Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | 4 |
|---|---|
| Match # | 14 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Ryu - 34.97% L-Block - 27.91% Meta Knight - 24.42% The Dog - 12.74% |
| GameFAQs Expectations |
L-Block first place (2pts) - 49.02% L-Block second place (1pt) - 17.02% Ryu second place (2pts) - 43.81% Ryu first place (1pt) - 30.99% |
| Advancing Prediction |
L-Block - 66.04% (28,333) Ryu - 74.80% (32,091) |
If you look in the wayback machine, you'll think most people wanted L-Block to come out in 2008 and get destroyed. This is simply not the case. It was a mixed reception, with a lot of people fully on the joke train that year. A lot of people were rooting against the repeat, but a lot of others either wouldn't have minded a repeat or were only rooting against the block because they wanted something else -- the Duck Hunt dog, the Weighted Companion Cube, the Sandbag from Smash Bros, CATS, Hogger, your sister's ass, the pony express, et al -- to take the bandwagon title.
This was a heavily debated match pre-contest, with almost all of the arguing revolving around the defending champ. It was early in joke trend world, but Board 8 was wise to it early. We all knew that L-Block would fall off a bit (though nothing like what we'd see in the future with Draven), plus this poll also featured another joke all-star with the Duck Hunt dog. So L-Block had two huge things working against it; the novelty wearing off, and a basset hound potentially syphoning off a bunch of votes right in the first match. Jokes winning require the bandwagon effect, and for those rooting against L-Block, the potential existed for him to lose early in this contest.
The issue, of course, was whether or not Ryu and Meta Knight were tough enough to pull it off. As someone who both picked against L-Block and would have loved to see him win the contest again, I can explain the logic here well enough. I thought L-Block would have the typical joke trend fallout the following year, and didn't think there was a chance he'd come back with any strength. Ryu has a very consistent contest guy over the years, which is why we all picked him to get first place.
The wild card was Meta Knight. Kirby games have never been strong on here, but they also aren't why Kirby himself has contest strength. You can thank character design and Smash Bros for that, which thanks to BrawlFEAR Meta Knight had in spades. He actually made the contest in 2007 pre-Brawl, and though he finished a distant second, he did advance into round 2. With Brawl at his back, with L-Block anti-bandwagon at his back, with the Nova Scotia bloodhound dalmation beagle basset duck tolling short haired pointer retriever stealing joke votes, I truly thought we would see Ryu > Meta Knight > L-Block (close third place) > goodest boy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_asNhzXq72w
Yeah we screwed that one up pretty bad, folks. In fairness, most people thought this was going to be Ryu > L-Block, but even those folks dropped the ball. That's because L-Block, at least early on in this contest, showed no signs whatsoever of slowing down from its 2007 pace. When this poll started, Ryu and L-Block not only left Meta Knight and the dog in the dust, but L-Block showed off its joke trends all over again. It dominated the early voting of this poll even in the face of an anti-bandwagon, and this led to a lot of chicken little junk all over Board 8. There's nothing we can do, L-Block is going to steamroll all over again, and blah blah blah. You guys know I love my rallies and joke trends, so I was loving every second of the early going.
Seeing L-Block going nuts for the second year in a row... that. That puts a smile on my face. It sucked seeing Meta Knight and one good boy getting sacrificed for it, but it was a small price to pay for salvation. It looked early on as if we would get a simple L-Block > Ryu result, but then joke trends took over and L-Block started falling off. We ended up having a very good fight for first place here that would have been the stuff of legends were it an actual 1v1 match in a legitimately formatted contest. Can you imagine if L-Block was defending its title in a 1v1 match and Ryu gave it the duel we saw here?
This is why I don't like 4way formats. We had this epic fight for first, and it meant dick. L-Block and Ryu would both advance anyway, so outside of point order and bragging rights, the actual result meant nothing. It's why it took me 12 years to bother writing this, because when epic fights for second place mean more than epic fights for first, your format sucks. That said, this was a hell of a match to watch, and the explosion on the forums was amazing. There was so much whining about L-Block, and it was great.
As for the match, Ryu chopped off a 550 vote lead overnight, and then did his best impersonation of rubberband AI for 16 hours. You know how when you're playing Mario Kart or Madden and the AI gets more difficult as you get more ahead of it? That was Ryu in this match. The more L-Block pulled ahead, the tougher Ryu got. But then he would catch up, and just.... die. Then L-Block would pull ahead and it would start all over again. He came back from a 550 vote deficit overnight, died, and fell behind by 620. Then the ASV hit, Ryu won it, he came back, died again, and fell behind by 450. Ryu started coming back again when the second night vote hit, but then the poll ended.
If this format wasn't garbage, we'd be talking about a great duel, L-Block outlasting Ryu, and what L-Block's odds were against Crono in round 2. As-is, L-Block and Ryu basically touched gloves at match's end with a gentlemen's agreement to see each other again soon. I hate it. Shadow vs Zidane and Isaac vs Lucario for distant second place should not mean more than the match we just watched. It just shouldn't, and I feel like Allen realized this after the 2009 games contest. It's just not the same as the finality of one and done. But more on that when we conclude all this up.
Meta Knight basically crapped the bed here, though one wonders if the dog being here actually hurt Meta Knight as much as it did L-Block, the latter of which got first place even with some factors working against him. Focus quickly turned to round 2, where we would see Crono, Amaterasu, L-Block, and Ryu all in a poll together. For those rooting against the block to repeat, they soon realized that L-Block beat Ryu with a bunch of albatrosses hanging on him. In round 2, there would be nothing to slow him down, and it led to more arguing on the board about whether or not L-Block style contestants were good for contests. People were extrapolating this huge path forward and assuming L-Block would win again, and people were also going nuts extrapolating these crazy paths for characters not yet seen in polls.
And Pikachu was just sitting there this whole time like https://static.magiquiz.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Surprised-Pikachu.png
Stats and Analysis[]
- L-Block overperformed by +3.90%, the #24 most impressive performance of 2008
For the OTHER half of the board, if L-Block wasn't going to be done in Round 2, it would fall a round earlier. Ryu was presumably safe in first, so it was down to the posterboy for Brawl's unbalanced gameplay, Meta Knight, to do it. And in theory, it made sense - Meta Knight beat Peach when he was only a trailer, he was THE most overused character in Brawl, and the piece of fodder in this match - The Dog - was going to put a serious hurt on L, allowing Meta Knight to slip through and slay the contest champ.
Yeah, right. This theory is probably the reason why Ryu lost this match. One day after Amaterasu lifted her hind leg and pissed all over the dreams of Board 8, the Block itself came down the screen and smashed the remains into oblivion. The match itself started ambiguously, but hopefully - L-Block clearly wasn't the same entity that had annihilated Link, Cloud, and Snake last year, it wasn't hitting those numbers against Ryu, Meta Knight, and The Dog. Meta Knight had a very strong opening vote, and if L's trends from last year held, we could see the miracle not never happen, right?
Well, there was a problem. L's trends DIDN'T follow last year's. In fact, even though the first hour was still his best hour, he stayed consistent pretty much all day. And that, combined with Meta's collapse after the first update (which implied he stole Ryu's board vote), and Ryu being a day chump... yeah, you see where I'm going with this. Ryu's morning vote and ASV would be the death of him, as they have in so many years past, while L Block barely seemed phased by either.
And that's what was so scary. It is impossible to overstate this - L was looking, for all intents and purposes, legit this year. And this was all with The Dog presumably leeching its support, a bandwagon yet to come, an Ammy that refused to fold... and really, how was Ryu supposed to beat L next round when he couldn't do it in THIS round?
With that, and looking at the competition and SFF in future rounds, L making the finals seemed a virtual lock. Even the staunchest of holdouts were beginning to anoint it the repeat champ (with all the whining that goes with that). All we had to do was see how the specifics played out.
Match Trends[]
Ngamer's Same Day Analysis[]
Match Prediction[]
So it begins... the great battle of our time.
For the first time in history, we can honestly say that the most important match of the Contest takes place tomorrow... in the first round. What the wha? Let's jump right in!
Last Known Values
- L - 64.83% (2007)
- Ryu - 28.05% (2007)
- Meta Knight - 22.80% (2007)
- The Dog - new
The great battle is, in this case, BRAWLFEAR vs JOKEFEAR. Meta Knight's got alot going for him in this one- he was dismissed as "guy from a trailer" last season and some B8ers picked him to not only finish behind Peach, but behind CATS as well. (CATS!) Instead he proved that he's got a loyal Kirby following that stuck behind him and pushed him on to nice showings, even when SSB competition arrived in the form of Fox. He's still got that loyal Kirby backing, he's still got his very appealing character design, and now he's actually BEEN IN SSB as well. Where, just by the by, he's both a casual favorite and the undisputed #1 ranked choice on the pro-level tiers. Whoa! What could stand in the way of so many strong positive points?
Well, his opponent, uh... beat Link last year. Pretty easily. Does that count for anything? The crazy thing is, maybe it doesn't! Even though L ended the season as arguably the biggest powerhouse we've ever seen, he STARTED it not all that far above the fodder line, and had to rely on extremely fortunate bracket placement in order to survive in both round one and round two. Will the L-Block train need a few rounds to gain steam in '08? Will it even gain steam at all, or will the internet at large agree that the joke has grown stale and its time to move on? So many questions regarding JOKEFEAR, with so few answers to this point in the Contest... lucky for us those answers will be arriving in only a couple hours now.
Seems like an epically close battle to this point- but what's this? It appears that SB has introduced a new twist that's going to tip the scales! In a brilliant move on his part, SB has decided to throw a major monkey wrench into L's gears right from the outset: not only are Ryu and Meta strong in their own right, and independent of each other so that both should perform at peak strength, L is also being challenged by a little something called Joke LFF! Could The Dog be L's perfect poison? I contend that it's more likely than you might think. He's an old school character that any gamer from the NES era should recognize, but he's also totally ridiculous and will look look just as out of place in the selection block as any other joke from this season. Plus, he got the perfect match pic! Let's not forget that the last time voters were offered a joke vote alternative to L-Block they jumped ship in droves by rallying ?-Block to a very easy victory over the '07 champ, and this on the day when his strength should have been at its all-time height.
In summation, Ryu is great in this format and should perform like a champ tomorrow, Meta Knight is very good in this format and should perform well also, and even though L-Block outdid Kirby, there will be no Donkey Kong tomorrow to hold MK back- instead, Blocky's the one who will have to deal with LFF, and The Dog will be the key to his defeat.
(Now, how much of that writeup was honest reasoning versus wishful thinking? You decide!)
When we take all of that wall of text into consideration, convert it into numbers, and cook it up in the big ol' pot, we come out with
- Ryu (Street Fighter) - 34.60%
- Meta Knight - 26.85%
- L-Block - 26.75%
- The Dog - 11.80%
Death to the Block, you say? Why that sounds... delicious!
Ngamer Says: Ryu > Meta Knight
Next Day Review[]
Darn you Bloooock! But let me clear up something from yesterday before we begin: I don't hate joke characters. Really, I don't. Block and the Dog turned this into an exciting match, WCC forcing either Tidus or DK to choke away R2 will be pretty funny, Hogger knocking out Laharl and Ramza will be worth a laugh, and if the Sandman can actually rise up and punch Magus out of the tourney it will be hilariously embarrassing. My problem is that thanks to the nature of the format, these jokes AREN'T jokes anymore- instead of being worth some giggles and small R1 excitement, 4 ways only make them more dangerous as the competition around them becomes more legitimate. And that's just silly. Examples: that great Vincent vs Crono rematch everyone's been looking forward to seeing? Sorry, now its going to be a meaningless fight for third. That epic duel for a spot in the Final between Vincent and Mario? (Where Mario is weakened enough by Link and Samus to be in serious danger.) Yeah, that's been canceled and replaced by an obvious Link/L-Block advancement.
Past the first round these jokes don't make the tournament more fun, they just turn once-interesting matches into clear results thanks to their dull static joke strength. And that's why we need to return to 1v1s in 2009.