Topline Categories and Stats[]
The 10 Games That Made Bracket (And How Long They Lasted)
- Final Fantasy XV (Round 3)
- DOOM (Round 2)
- INSIDE (Round 1)
- XCOM 2 (Round 1)
- Overwatch (Round 2)
- Stardew Valley (Round 2)
- Dark Souls III (Round 2)
- Street Fighter V (Round 1)
- The Witness (Round 1)
- Uncharted 4 (Round 1)
Notable Snubs:
- Titanfall 2
- Ratchet & Clank
- Darkest Dungeon
- Hyper Light Drifter
- Hitman
- The Last Guardian
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice
Headliners: Final Fantasy XV, Dark Souls III, DOOM
Busts: Uncharted 4, Overwatch
Snubs Analysis[]
Do NOT be fooled by all the awesome on that banner, this year is NOT as cool as those pictures imply. 2016 very much felt like an interim year for the industry; a lot of companies had blown their load in 2015, and a LOT of others were saving up for the storm that was on the horizon. Nintendo was definitely the guiltiest of the latter; the Wii U was doing ok-ish in 2014 and 2015, but it just DIED this year. The standout releases were a Paper Mario game no one liked, and a crossover between Shin Megami Tensei and Fire Emblem that ended up infinitely lamer than the concept implies (yes I played it, and yes I’m one of those people that’s still salty that it was… what it was). Oh, and a Star Fox game that may have very well killed that series for at least another half decade. Again.
So snubs were, again, lacking. Personally, neither new-age Hitman game appearing in bracket was a massive disappointment, as they are the best stealth games ever. Yes, EVER. If you haven’t played them, do yourself a favor and grab the second one, which allows you to purchase and slot in the entire first game as ‘DLC’. It’s the most freeform stealth I’ve ever experienced, and there are so many ways to accomplish your assassinations that you can spend a dozen hours in just one level. It’s insane. Maybe it’s best they didn’t make bracket ‘cause they’d have surely gotten fodderized by some nonsense.
This site isn’t big on FPSes, a fact I’m sure you’re very, very familiar with if you ever bet on Halo or CoD scoring a big win in the past two decades and getting instantly burned by your pick. But, even in spaces where shooters aren’t well-regarded, I see a lot of love for Titanfall 2, a game incidentally made by a lot of former CoD people. Personally, I was having a lovely time with its parkour-based movement system and great setpieces… until I clipped through the fucking floor, and for some insane reason, no matter how many times I reloaded my save, I kept glitching in the same exact place. Yah, no. I wasn’t replaying everything up til that point on the off-chance that the game would un-fuck itself when I returned to that point.
Speaking of jank, anyone remember the Last Guardian? Y’know, that massively anticipated game that was eternally delayed, the PS3 game that never was, the successor to my favorite game ever, Shadow of the Colossus (yah, if you’re coming from Ulti’s write-ups that must have been some serious whiplash)? It did actually come out, and a lot of people really liked it! I definitely didn’t, because whatever qualms one might have with SotC’s controls, TLG’s were infinitely, infinitely worse. Still, would have made an interesting entrant.
And then there’s a handful of little snubs, like some decent indies in Hyper Light Drifter and Darkest Dungeon. Ratchet and Clank was a pretty good game, though considering Up Your Arsenal has always been destroyed in these, I can’t see this one doing much better. And of course the obligatory Phoenix Wright shoutout, the last one of the write-up!
Bust Analysis[]
This year was so bleh across the board, picking busts was actually kinda hard. There was the obvious one, though. I’m old enough to remember when Uncharted was one of the biggest deals in gaming, when the second game was regularly placing on top 20s and even top 10s of all time. Over time, though, it seems like its placement on those lists has receded more and more, and the series as a whole just doesn’t have the same amount of clout. Maybe it’s when we realized that we were getting sick of hyper-linear cinematic shooters and wanted games that felt a little more organic, though honestly things have come full circle at this point and games like Doom Eternal are whole heartedly welcome after the 70 billionth open-world game.
I say all this, but believe it or not, Uncharted 4 was the consensus game of 2016 according to GotYBlogs. Yes, really. That’s more an indictment of the year than anything else, if you ask me. Look at the consensus GotY in the second half of the decade according to that site:
The Witcher 3
Uncharted 4
Breath of the Wild
God of War
*Not actually determined yet because of how close Death Stranding and RE2 are*
Personally, UC4 sticks out like a sore thumb. The other three are massively generation-defining in some way, whereas UC4 is mostly a retread of PS3-era game design with a massively bloated story and atrocious pacing. And for a game that brands itself as ‘cinematic’, it kinda lives and dies on how well-paced and structured that cinema is.
Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it got absolutely smacked by Mario Kart 8. 58-42 in a debated match is NOT a good look, and while you can argue that MK8 has the Nintendo factor going for it, it’s also a frickin kart-racer. UC4, on paper, should be closer to the kind of game this site likes. Now, MK8 proved to be fairly legit, so this isn’t insanely embarrassing, but still. You have to wonder if UC2 in its prime would have dropped this match.
Do you know what was a very close second to Uncharted 4 in terms of GotY awards received that year was? Overwatch. Now, this wasn’t much of a bust if you’re a savvy enough contest-goer to know that casual bait like this was never going to do well on this site, but let’s think about it. It won pretty convincingly over Death Stranding, 56-44 style. So far so good, right? After all, this match was decently debated, and Death Stranding can’t be THAT bad, right?
Oh, yes it can! Xenoblade absolutely curbstomped Overwatch with 73% of the vote, in the match that solidified it as a contender for the Quarterfinals. This made Overwatch a peer of games like Nioh and Dead Space 2 and a bunch of other shit this site doesn’t care about. Keep in mind, Overwatch was one of the biggest games of the decade, and ushered in a short-lived wave of hero shooters that all collapsed immediately because no one was gonna budge from Overwatch.
But, uh, note the term ‘short-lived’. The hero shooter phase turned out to be one of the shortest lived fads of the decade, as PUBG’s rise single-handedly halted that genre’s momentum and made battle royale modes the ‘in’ thing. Add that to the Blizzard/Hong Kong debacle, and it’s no wonder Overwatch severely underperformed in a format where it might have benefited from a contest title boost.
Headliner Analysis[]
Do not misunderstand, Dark Souls III and DOOM are only both headliners because I needed to fill a two game quota, and much like my HGSS/Galaxy dilemma, I really had no justification for including one without the other, because both their cases are equally flimsy. As for FFXV, it’s here because it was literally the only game this year to make it past Round 2, even though it did so in the most humiliating way possible.
So let’s try to unpack this mess. I guess I’ll start with DkSIII because it’s probably the most ‘huh?’ entry here. Well, if you don’t remember, no one expected shit from this game. It was a clear third-string in the Dark Souls/Bloodborne/Dark Souls III Souls-like trio (just like it is in wider Internet culture), expected to job to New Vegas in unceremonious fashion.
The first round of this fourpack, however, started making people sweat a bit. When the match STARTED, Dark Souls was actually doing almost as well on Dishonored as New Vegas was on the Stanley Parable, a funny little game that no one seems to remember. While Dishonored isn’t worth much either, it’s at least a game with a bit of a brand and a strong cult following, and so these results started whispers of a Round 2 upset. Unfortunately for Dark Souls, the numbers started to normalize over the course of the day, with Dishonored climbing and Stanley Parable falling. Still, it was enough to cast doubt on the DkS/Fallout duel.
And what a duel it was! … for like ten minutes. Dark Souls looked alright in defeat, but the 54-46 indicated that this did not end up being the explosive match we were hoping for. At the end of the day, it would only really serve as foreshadowing for how well Bloodborne and Dark Souls I would hold up in Round 3 and beyond; if even the worst of three did pretty good, the other two had a bright future ahead of them.
DOOM’s Round 1 hype was even more deafening. Imagine being in the midst of the Indie Fear arc of the contest. Imagine seeing how BotW, the obvious contender for the GotD title, broke 85% in Round 1. Now, imagine then watching DOOM, a game no one was expecting much out of, put down 86% on its opponent, fellow 2016-mate INSIDE. People went bananas when this match happened, and DOOM went from being on no one’s radar to suddenly being a contender for Quarterfinals. Eternal’s successful launch and the subsequent meme storm occurring just before this contest started were credited for what seemed to be a highly dominant performance from the 2016 title, and as such, its Round 2 match with RE2 was considered a complete tossup (a common theme for RE2’s run, thinking about it now).
AND… 58-42 for RE2. No pomp, no circumstance, just a stomping from the original favorite of this match. This was the point where two things were beginning to crystallize: one, the massive blowouts we’d seen all throughout Round 1 didn’t mean squat, and two, indie games weren’t powerful for the mere fact that they were indie games. Sounds ridiculous to read, I’m sure, but as I’ve touched on many times at this point, at this point in time people were giving undue credit to every game that didn’t happen to have a big-time publisher, and it never wasn’t weird.
Speaking of which, let’s move to a game that was on Ground Zero of the Indie Fear arc. People weren’t 100% sure what to think of FFXV; it won our personal 2016 GotY poll, and it DOES have Final Fantasy in its title, though that brand has only been getting more and more tarnished on this site as the years roll by. On the other hand, FFXV was yet another bead on the string of embarrassments Square was threading (though I personally like it well enough), and it’s not like it was going to do shit with BotW breathing down its neck.
FFXV was there on day one of the contest, working over Edith Finch with a nice tripling. Or, what looked like a nice tripling. As this was the very first day and expectations were still up in the air, with no one knowing whether we were going to see blowouts at all outside of BotW, we all looked at that and figured, eh, that looks fine. Nothing to be worried about. This was one of those matches that only started looking bad as the contest progressed; as we watched games like DOOM, Mario Galaxy 2, and God of War put much bigger numbers on games just as obscure as Edith Finch, something became clear: FFXV SUCKED.
As we approached Round 2, there was more and more chatter surrounding its match with Hollow Knight, which had impressed a lot of people in Round 1 (people who clearly were not aware of the game’s clout, natch). And UNLIKE the other Round 2 matches I’ve touched on so far, this one was actually worth the hype, starting the second round of the contest with a bang. Amazingly, Hollow Knight actually led for about half an hour, and despite FFXV being the bracket favorite, a lot of people on B8 were celebrating the potential upset. Even if they hadn’t played Hollow Knight, they were treating it as the face to FFXV’s heel.
But FFXV caught one of the luckiest breaks of the contest. The delays hurt some games and helped others; The Last of Us, for example, was clearly hurt, but this Round 2 match just happened to be occurring literally the day after FFVII Remake was released. Naturally, a shitton of Final Fans were hitting up GameFAQs for help and such, and tossed FFXV a courtesy vote. It eventually got the lead and held onto it, finishing 221 votes ahead of Hollow Knight. Does ANYONE believe that if FFVII had gotten another Square-style delay, this result wouldn’t have flipped? It was merely by the grace of Allen that FFXV, a game that carried the legacy of the second biggest series on this site, didn’t choke to a game about bugs that half the board wasn’t even aware was popular. Trust me, if this year didn’t suck, FFXV would have definitely been slapped with the ‘bust’ title here.
But it got to keep bumbling along, shrugging its shoulders at the inevitable destruction BotW was gonna sling at it. Destruction is relative, though. Zelda had fodderized Halo and the Outer Worlds, but Final Fantasy was different, right? That’s too strong of a name on GameFAQs, it surely could maintain a scrap of dignity on its way out, right?
Right?
Hahaha. Zelda broke 80% IN ROUND THREE. Personally, I was devastated; not because I gave a shit about FFXV getting nuked, but because I was shilling for Hollow Knight all contest long, and this suddenly meant that it wasn’t even a top 5 indie title, (it’s SEVENTH in KP’s stats, eighth if you include Minecraft, below a severely antivoted Undertale.) making me look like a straight-up dumbass. But honestly? As funny as it is to say that FFXV was a massive embarrassment to its legacy here, I do think this match was a little weird. I honestly believe that the dynamic at play was causing BotW to overperform; the juxtaposition of yet another perceived failure of the Final Fantasy series being matched against Zelda’s modern magnum opus (and perhaps just magnum opus, period) was just too obvious to voters, and I think many accordingly rewarded Nintendo and punished Square. I’d argue that Hollow Knight would have performed much better in FFXV’s position, helping both games save face.
Still though, if you take this match at face value, it means that FFXV would have been absolutely destroyed in many of the other fourpacks in this contest, ruining a shitton of brackets in the process. Would you have taken Tomb Raider over FFXV? How about Stardew Valley? Hell, if you swap its 5 seed with the 3 or 6 seed in this very Division, it might have lost IMMEDIATELY to shit like Bravely Default and Ni No Kuni. Imagine the shitstorm that would have caused! And best of all, it placed lower in the final x-stats than some of the games it beat in the 2016 poll, such as Uncharted 4 and DOOM. Har har har.
Other Thoughts[]
If that all just read like the weakest, least convincing Headliner write-up I’ve done, it’s because it damn well is. NONE of those games would have even sniffed Headliner status in ANY other year, and FFXV is prime bust material. But what else is there? I guess Stardew Valley deserves props for ending up as the second strongest indie game in bracket, but that’s damning with faint praise. INSIDE was on the receiving end of the second biggest blowout of the contest, and the Witness merely acted as proof that Yakuza was pretty legit.
Here’s the real question: is this year better or worse than 2014? On the one hand, half this field made it past Round 1, which proportionally speaking is pretty good. On the other hand, only ONE game made it to Round 3, and you can damn well bet it wouldn’t have in any other fourpack. There was nothing here as pleasantly surprising as MK8’s performance, and this is by far the worst line-up of Headliners in the decade.
Ahh I’ll save this for the final rankings. For now, let there be no doubt that I’m only handing out two failing grades, and this year is DEFINITELY getting a big fat F stamped on its forehead. As I said, this was very much an interim year, the calm before the storm…
Final Grade
F - FFXV is a headliner this year. ‘Nuff said.