Results[]
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | North Division |
|---|---|
| Match # | 04 |
| Match Date | Friday, July 4th, 2003 |
| Vote difference | 29,732 |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Magus - 56.92% (23,370 brackets) |
Before getting into the background of this match, let me quote Ngamer64 about how weird the beginning of this poll was...
"Magus had just the strangest opening of all time... Let me break it down, for history's sake:
1. The poll opened 22 minutes late, meaning it was being ransacked by about 400 gamers, all trying to get the first vote in, and refreshing 100 times a minute.
2. The poll finally opened, but with a message saying that Ganon/Tidus was over, and you couldn't vote in it anymore.
3. The results came online, but Magus was marked as having every single vote... plus 5-15 more added to that! He reached over 103% at one point.
4. It got really strange here... at the same time as the results changed to show TWO Sam Fishers competing against 1 Magus (who still had more than all the votes), the pic at the front of the page got seriously messed up, stretching to about 50 times its normal size, all the way down the right side of the page.
5. Normal results finally surfaced, with Magus leading with 72% of the vote with 240 votes cast."
With that out of the way, this was the first tune-up for what was supposed to be Magus's dash at taking away Link's crown. Magus was the most hyped character after Summer 2002 due to Crono's success and people feeling that Magus was much more popular. Ergo, here we were. Magus was given a ton of board support during the nomination phase, yet somehow only received a 13 seed.
And it was this 13 seed that people blamed for Magus not doing so hot in this match. It wasn't that a near-doubling was bad, but one needed to do a lot better than simply doubling Sam Fisher to have a shot at beating Link. But no matter. People simply blamed seeding and/or bracket voting and went on believing that Magus was the Second Coming. It should be worth noting that right from the beginning, Magus had a problem with starting off very well in his matches, then slowing down as the match went on. He went from being over 70% at the beginning of this to missing out on a doubling.
As for Sam Fisher, the big talk wasn't how he did in the match or even who he was (Am I the only one who had never heard of him before this match?), but how the hell he managed to get a 4 seed in this contest. The board was so unbelievably annoyed about this that in one contest, Sam Fisher cost his team a finals appearance because people didn't want to see him in it. It was one of those contests where the creator had 16 entrants, each grouped by the characters in the contest seeding.
The 2 Seeds (Samus, Sonic, Sephiroth, and Mega Man) won with extreme ease, but the 4 Seeds could have beaten them if Sam Fisher wasn't on their team. The board's hate for Sam started with him getting this 4 seed, and it really hasn't stopped since. He's one of the worst of all time with the board vote, and his less-than-stellar games (all of which are failed attempts at being better than MGS series) don't exactly help stave this off.