Lurker > Yesmar_

British

I really picked a bad year to try to get over my fear of flying, huh?

Yeah, Starcraft had a perfect storm of hitting probably the biggest anti-vote target on each console at the time.

And, it turned out, that is exactly what Starcraft got. Once again, an hour or so after midnight, the Battle.net servers crackled with energy and brought forth a rally to save their game. Wind Waker would be completely overwhelmed by a rally that saw Starcraft, at its peak, coming back by nearly 500 votes in a matter of only 30 minutes. What had looked to be a close, but survivable match just an hour or two earlier was now completely hopeless for the Nintendo game, as, just like it had in Round 1, Starcraft moved into the lead with one hour left to go in the poll. Just like it had before, the rally ground to a halt at this point and things stalled out for the remaining minutes of the poll, the board watching in shock as Starcraft emerged as the winner, having made its way, against all odds, to the Elite Eight. It turned out that its Cinderella story wasnt quite over yet.

The reaction to all this would end up being a lot more mixed than it had been to Starcrafts earlier upsets. Despite Ceejs proclamations to the contrary (which he also used to insult Wind Waker fans for good measure), it was hard not to be a little suspicious of Starcrafts finish. It had been one thing for Starcraft to do this against Halo, a game that relied a good deal on its own rallies, and which also wasnt particularly beloved on the board, but to do this against Zelda made people stand up and pay attention. Sure the evidence of rallying instead of stuffing was clear on Battle.net, but 2,000 votes in the last quarter of the match? That was a lot. And why did the rally grind to a halt right when Starcraft got the lead every time? As I said above, the evidence of rallying was very clear, and it was very easy to dismiss these as the questions of fanboys or sore losers, a not entirely unfair generalization. Stil, the match would remain shrouded in suspicion and things werent helped much by Starcrafts controversial next round match with Melee. Did it cheat, did it not? Why do we anthropomorphize contest entrants in this way anyway? In any case, this match would kick off the end of the All Zelda Final Four, a five day period that saw all four of them eliminated virtually back to back. The defeat of Zelda, the success of Starcraft, this match stands out as one of the last gasps of an earlier era on the site. The favorites were not as locked in and homogeneous as they would come to be, and it didnt require some snowballing joke to upset them. All it required was a few carriers, and the greatest underdog run we had ever seen.

7. Starcraft vs. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker (Sp2004) R3

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a0703099.jpg

Starcraft 50.1% 41480
The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker 49.9% 41309
TOTAL VOTES 82789
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(16)Starcraft_vs_(5)The_Legend_of_Zelda:_The_Wind_Waker_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1655-division-32-semifinals-starcraft-vs-the-legend-of-zelda-the

GameFAQS certainly seems to know what it wants. Not always in line with the received mainstream gamer wisdom, GameFAQS has always had a reputation for doing its own thing. While the gaming world outside might be buffeted by storms and revolutions, there has always been a consistency to whats popular on the site. For better or worse, over the years we have come to accept a certain kind of result, a certain kind of hierarchy, whether it be the Nintendo Vs. Square rivalry of the early years, or the LAW that dominated the back half of things, or the general disinterest in PC gaming which has been with us the whole time. GameFAQS wasnt always so homogeneous, however. The early years of the contests could be a bit spikier, with more contradictions to what was beginning to become the received wisdom of the contest community. We saw entrants break through or come close to breaking through that never would have come close by the time we got to the contests final years. And there was of course no better example of this than Starcraft. Aside from the natural underdog support that it got from being a 16 Seed, the fact that Starcraft was such an un-GameFAQS type of game certainly added to its mystique. But there are limits to how well an un-GameFAQS kind of game can do on the site, even one as beloved as Starcraft, and by the time it got to this match, it was about to run into them. Halo had been a paper tiger, and Kingdom Hearts had been a minor jewel in Squares crown. But in the Third Round it would face its greatest test of all, the most recent game from the most popular series from the most popular company on the site. The previous years GOTY winner by a decent margin. It was time to go up against Wind Waker. This was when the GameFAQS hierarchy was supposed to finally reassert itself. But what we got instead turned out to be the least GameFAQS match of all time.

Even after pulling off a second upset in Round 2 against Kingdom Hearts, Starcraft wasnt given much of a chance to perform the hat trick and win again here. For those with a less than charitable opinion of Starcrafts potential, it was easy enough to write off its previous two victories as due more to the opponents weaknesses than due to any kind of strength on Starcrafts part. Kingdom Hearts had, after all, massively disappointed in Round 1, and it was clear from the Oracle predictions for its Round 2 match that the board had lost all confidence in its ability to put down Starcraft with any degree of certainty. On the other side of this match, you had of course, Zelda. The All Zelda Final Four that had been hyped up since the First Round was still going strong at this point, all four of the Zelda games having made the Sweet Sixteen, and so far three of those four had managed to make the Elite Eight as well. Wind Waker was the last one remaining, and its path to the Divisional Finals seemed to be clear as well, ensuring that half the remaining games in the contest would belong to the Zelda series. The seriess first sign of weakness would come from LttP, who had a much harder time than expected putting away FFVI, an ill omen for its upcoming match with (what was thought to be) the much stronger Chrono Trigger. Wind Waker had had its own minor disappointment against Metroid Prime in Round 2, being the only Zelda title to fail to SFF its same gen Nintendo brethren. That might have sent up warning signs if its Round 3 opponent had been anything besides Starcraft, which, massive rally potential or not, had emerged as a serious underdog. Common sense did say after all that there was no way a PC game was beating one of the top Nintendo games of the current gen.

But the board really wanted it to. Or at least a very vocal portion of the board did. And this wasnt necessarily because of some Zelda always wins sentiment either; people generally preferred the PC strategy game over the iconic Nintendo game. Like I said above, these were more heterogeneous times. Both in the contest community, as well as on the site in general. People might not have had much faith in Starcrafts ability to pull out another win, but they still showed up for the polls start, the typical Nintendo Board Vote being overwhelmed by support for Starcraft instead. It wasnt just doing better than expected in this early going, it was actually straight up winning. While its lead was never able to break triple digits, it held on for a good three and a half hours, proving that its earlier success had not been a fluke. To go 50/50 with a mainline Zelda title for any length of time would be impressive for any game, let alone one that was so far out of the GameFAQS mainstream. Wind Waker would undoubtedly sweep into the lead with the Day Vote, but with these initial hours, Starcraft had proved its strength beyond any reasonable doubt, and regardless of how the rest of the match turned out, it would go out of the contest on top. As expected, the day was kind for Wind Waker, and thanks to a strong Morning Vote, it would not only take the lead but push said lead up and up as the hours stretched on. In the space of just six hours, Wind Waker had taken a 50/50 match and turned it into a 52.5% victory, a quite rapid turnaround. By noon EST, the lead had broken 1,500 votes, and if Wind Waker kept up at this pace it might very well end the day close to what it had been expected to finish at pre-match. Not bad considering its struggle early on. All that was left for it to do was to finish the job.

And that was something that once the afternoon rolled in, Wind Waker started struggling to do. Starting at around 1:00 PM EST, Starcraft started striking back, making cuts into the lead here and there. It was not consistent enough to stop WWs gains entirely and the Zelda game did manage to bring up its total lead to just over 2,000 votes by evening, but it was enough to keep the match just tantalizingly in reach. In reach, but just barely so. This was within the bounds of what we had seen before, but it was still twice as much as the comeback that Starcraft had needed to pull off against Halo. Unlike that match however, Startcrafts comeback got started earlier. Around 9:00 PM EST, Starcraft finally stopped playing games with its pokes and prods and got to work beginning its comeback in earnest. Just like in the match with Halo the fact that this was a time period when votes were normally dying down proved to be no bother, and Starcraft got to work cutting down the lead at a rapid pace, even faster than it had initially done against Halo. Within two hours, Wind Wakers percentage had fallen below 51% and its lead had dropped by 500 votes. By midnight EST the lead was below 1,000 votes and falling fast. This was the amount that Starcraft had been behind by in Round 1 when it made its move, and while the match was further along, Starcraft was moving at a rapid pace. Once again, if trends continued we were on pace for a photo finish. Starcraft would need another 1:00 AM rally if it wanted to gain a solid edge.

Luigi

8. Halo: Combat Evolved vs. Starcraft (Sp2004) R1

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/700e325f.jpg

Halo: Combat Evolved 49.83% 56258
Starcraft 50.17% 56631
TOTAL VOTES 112889
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Halo:_Combat_Evolved_vs_(16)Starcraft_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1625-division-128-round-1-halo-combat-evolved-vs-starcraft

It would be easy to look at this match on a surface level and come away with the conclusion that this was a massive surprise. The games involved, the seeding upset, the prediction percentage, etc. That however, would be a mistake. This was one of the most hotly debated matches of the entire contest, and possibly one of the most debated First Round matches of all time. The scale of the upset, if it went through, was obvious to everyone, and rather than temper expectations, this only added fuel to the fire, as aside from the scale of the upset being obvious, the chances of it occurring seemed quite obvious as well. Certainly higher than a 1/16 match had ever been before, or would ever be again. It was clear from the start, of course, how inaccurate the seedings were. First, the obvious issue. Why a six year old PC game that was able to be faithfully ported to the Nintendo 64 was put in the 128 Bit Division I have no idea, and I dont think Ceej ever provided an explanation either. But here it was, and thanks to the fact that the nomination system that year only allowed users to nominate one game per console, its opponent was the in over its head 1 Seeded Halo. Not anyones idea of GameFAQS favorite 128 bit game, the fact that it was on a generally disliked system allowed Halo to gobble up all those single Xbox nominations en route to an extremely inflated 1 seed. The stage was set for a massive upset, and we were dying to see it happen.

Round 1 went on, and we slogged through blowout after blowout in the first several divisions, waiting all the while for the 128 Bit Division, which even before it had started was being hyped up as the most unpredictable divison we had ever seen. The relative predictability of the other divisions was worth it just to see the chaos that would be unleashed starting with this match. A match, which as the days went on remained up in the air. This wasnt the kind of debate that had competing theories of the case either. We were less than a year out from Master Chiefs contest debut where he almost lost to Felix, so the vehemence of Xbox hatred was well known. The only question was whether it would be enough. We all knew what the possibilities were, but did anyone have the guts to actually pull the trigger? To predict a 16 Seed to win? We would find out soon enough whether going down that path was a foolhardy choice. The greatest Round 1 Match of all time, and the best match not to feature any entrant from Nintendo or Square was about to begin.

Any lingering doubts people might have had about Starcraft were erased in the polls opening hours, when the PC game got off to a smashing start, not just beating Halo, but beating it 55/45. And this wasnt just some kind of Board Vote Zerg Rush either. It would stay at those numbers for hour after hour in the early going, its lead increasing by hundreds of votes all throughout the First Night Vote. By 6 AM, the lead was cresting 1,000, an increasingly insurmountable figure. As we were now well into our third ever contest, we knew that overcoming that number was certainly possible, but the exact Vote Trends that would lead lead to it were still something of a mystery. We had gotten a taste of Halos Day Vote over the summer, but this match would mark the first time we understood the exact scale of it, the types of turnarounds it was capable of. Anyone who had been fretting about Halos Early Vote was about to get a reprieve, because as we were soon to find out, the king of the Day Vote had just arrived.

As soon as the sun came up on the East Coast, almost like clockwork, Halo would start making cuts, taking off hundreds of votes from the lead just as easily as Starcraft had put them on. Halo might not have been the most beloved game on GameFAQS, but it was not going to go down without a fight, and as the morning wore on, it was showing why its 1 Seed might not have been so undeserved after all. As Morning shifted into Midday, Halo drew captivatingly close to capturing the lead, but this time it was Starcrafts turn to fight back. Whether due to the shift in demographics that we now know as the During School Vote, or due to the general back and forth that occurs when a lead shifts over, the two games would hunker down into a draw for the first several hours of the afternoon, trading the lead back and forth multiple times. Needless to say, the board was enthralled. This was the match we had been waiting for, and the enthusiasm that this had generated would spill out into the Internet at large. Both of these games had very actively online fanbases, especially for the time, and throughout the day there would be a sub-battle occurring to see which fanbase could rally more of their supporters to the poll. Rallies might have a checkered history in our contests, but it was hard to find fault in them on a day like today, when the two sides seemed so evenly matched. Like the crowd at a tennis game, our eyes flitted back and forth, waiting for someone to finally pull ahead. And once the ASV kicked in, that entrant would be Halo. Just like in the morning, it was now firmly in control of the match, and while it had spent those early hours tearing down hundreds of votes from Starcrafts lead, it would spend the next several hours building up a several hundred vote lead of its own. As the evening kicked in, for the second time in the match a games lead would break 1,000 votes, Halo having pulled off a virtually unheard of 2,000 vote turnaround in the course of just 16 hours.

Now if the match had ended here, it would still be a classic, if maybe not a Top 10 one. Starcraft would be the little 16 Seed that could, the underdog that had put the screws to a 1 seed in a way that no one else ever had, an If Only.. scenario that would haunt us for years. It turned out however, that Starcraft had other plans, and with only five hours left to go, the second 1,000 vote comeback of the match would begin. If Halo was most powerful during the Day, the inverse was true regarding Starcraft and the Night, and despite the poll dying down in votes, it only increased in intensity as Starcraft cut into the lead at a steady rate. By the early morning hours, the poll was on pace to end in a photo finish, but then around 1:00 AM EST, the Mass Carriers finally arrived. Or, I should say, Battle.net did. With just under 400 votes left to go, a massive Starcraft rally ensued, destroying the rest of Halos lead in just an hour, and allowing Starcraft to move back into the lead with just over one hour left to go. We had never seen a rally of this magnitude, or at the very least such a concentrated rally, ever before, and there was nothing left to do but sit in awe for the final 60 minutes as Starcraft added to its lead, in the end becoming the first, and only, 16 Seed to ever beat a 1 Seed. Its not often that a match completely lives up the hype, but this is one of a handful that actually did. The final hours of the poll had hinted at a Starcraft that still had a few tricks up its sleeve, but would it ever get the chance to show them off again? After all, how could it ever live up to this match?

Hotel

Bump

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNty2y0DQN8

Maybe the Internet is good after all.

the Jungle

Echelon

Ryo actually wasn't as completely weak in 2002 as he would be in later years. He looked decent (for him) against Lara, although I suppose some of that could have been anti-votes.

Licorice

Ive written a lot so far about the boards reaction to L-Blocks run this year, and suffice it to say that the reaction to this result was more of the same: shock, confusion, laughter, and an increasing sense of unreality. While the Finals Match would be when L-Blocks run reached its climax, this one was the match in which we fully stepped through the looking glass for good. Its not always easy to pinpoint turning points on any kind of timeline, but when it comes to the history of the contests, this match certainly qualifies as definitive one. Its a cliche to say that nothing was ever the same, but that is truly the case here. No matter how many boring, predictable matches we would get afterward, this match happened, and the framework through which we viewed the contests, the horizons of their possibilities, would never be the same.

9. Solid Snake vs. L-Block vs. Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Squall Leonhart (2007) R4

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/f/fefd91d5.jpg

Solid Snake 28.86% 44489
L-Block 29.03% 44753
Sonic the Hedgehog 21.63% 33339
Squall Leonhart 20.49% 31584
TOTAL VOTES 154165
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Solid_Snake_vs_L-Block_vs_Sonic_the_Hedgehog_vs_Squall_Leonhart_2007
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2922-tournament-quarterfinal-snake-l-block-sonic-squall

Magical thinking has a very poor track record in contests. No matter how many times weve thought wouldnt that be funny or prayed for a Cinderella run to never end, weve always been forced to face reality at some point. The bill comes due, the fun ends, etc. Going into 2007, this was especially true, both due to our history up to this point, along with the massive amount of votes that each match was getting. All of the momentum waves that our little board was able to generate could seem almost pointless when stacked up against the swell of over 100,000 votes that were pouring into each match every day. But the thing about momentum is that something that starts out small can build and build as the days go on, until eventually it has taken on a life of its own and becomes large enough to tear down the whole foundation.

Get real! That was the common refrain when people first started speculating about L-Blocks chances of escaping from Round 4, pulling off yet another upset by sneaking by into second place yet again. Yes, L-Block had proven stronger than anyone expected, and yes, L-Block had, for two rounds in a row, advanced in second place ahead of the character who had beaten him the round before. But this match was different, exponentially different even. L-Block had pulled off those feats against midcarders. High end midcarders like Kirby and Kratos to be sure, but midcarders all the same. To expect him to put up the same kinds of numbers, let alone finish ahead of not one but potentially *two* Noble Nine characters (plus one of the strongest non-Noble Niners to boot) was of a completely different scale. The joke was supposed to end here when L-Block finally met his match, just as Bidoof and Mudkip had eventually run out of steam when they were forced to go toe to toe with characters a tier or two above themselves in populuarty. But even so, wouldnt it be hilarious if.It was hard for the board not to get a little carried away with what L-Block would be capable of he could pull off something crazy in this match. You could feel it in the air leading up to the match. On one hand, a lot of the speculation read like contest fanfiction that was trying to brute force a joke into existence, but on the other hand as much as we kept repeating to ourselves that L-Block advancing was impossible we could sense that something was different the same way you can always tell when you are trying to delude yourself into believing a lie. Wed be feeling dumb in some respect when the match was over, we just didnt know in which respect it would be.

The first sign that L-Block would be firing on all cylinders was when the match pics came out. This was the first round of the contest with completely user submitted pictures, and when it came to L-Block the pics did not disappoint. There had been complaints in all of L-Blocks previous matches that its picture was not really selling the joke, whether due to a blobby sprite or a confusing picture that seemed to come from an M-rated Tetris game. But there was something about the match pics for this round, pictures that showed three characters frozen in dramatic poses and then a Tetris block just sitting there, that captured the L-Block joke in all its absurdity. There was the Jeopardy picture of course, but as someone pointed out at the time, I dont think anything sold L-Block as much as the picture that featured extreme closeups of everyones eyesand then L-Blocks pic was just a closeup of a random corner. There seemed to be a recognition once these were released. Now even the people that had been lukewarm on L-Block finally got it. With all that anticipation in the air, the match started, and it was clear right from the start that the doubters were right in a way. This match was exponentially different from what had come before. L-Block was finally showing us its true power.

Rather than decrease as its competition improved, L-Blocks Early Vote seemed to get stronger and stronger as the contest went on, almost as if the joke was drawing power from the relative strength of its opponents. This match was no exception, and as great as L-Blocks previous Early Votes had been, this is probably the first one that could be called otherworldly. Despite having its hands full with three of the strongest characters in the bracket, for the first half hour it was managing to double Sonic and near double Snake with ease. Half an hour in, and L-Blocks lead on Snake had grown to 1,000, and his lead on Sonic was 500 votes more than that. Snake still had a shot at winning the match, but for Sonicthe unbelievable seemed on the verge of happening. Unlike Snake, Sonics percentage had started to staballize by this point, and while advancement was still a possibility early on, it became very clear very quickly that the numbers Sonic would need to pull that off wouldnt be coming anytime soon. Sonic would have to settle for winning his side battle with Squall for Third Place, a surprisingly hard fought matchup that saw Squall bring the lead down to double digits overnight, but which Sonic was able to safely put away during the day. Anyone saying that L-Block had no shot at the Noble Nine had been proved dead wrong, and the block wasnt just going to advance past Sonic, something that had at least been toyed with pre-match. L-Block seemed to poise to take down Snake himself, one of the strongest characters on the site.

Sonic/Squall was kind of fun, but the real marquee matchup here was L-Block vs. Snake. It had taken the block 30 minutes to get its lead to 1,000, and 60 minutes to get to 1,500, but things slowed down from there, taking an additional two hours for the Block to add 300 more votes, its lead peaking just over 1,800 just before 3 AM. And then, Snake struck back, just like he had in the previous round, but unlike the previous round, L-Block was not going to give up. Snake would take 1,000 votes off the lead by noon, his comeback consistent, but not overwhelming. His pace was good enough for a win, but not a definitive one. And then, as the afternoon kicked in, the pace of Snakes comeback slowed and sputtered, and then, eventually, died. He would be able to stall out L-Block for the rest of the match, always in striking distance if he suddenly went on a run, but the run that could have saved Snake never came, and he would be forced to advance in Second Place, well ahead of Sonic, but still behind, well, a Tetris block. L-Block had indeed failed to advance in Second Place for the fourth round in a row, but that did not end up dooming its prospects. The tetromino had simply decided to advance in first place instead.

Wicked's chances come down to how much momentum it's able to build after it (presumably) wins Best Ensemble at SAG. Winning Costumes and Production Design is a good prediction in any scenario, and Best Makeup is probably going to The Substance in any scenario as well, but it has a pretty wide range, honestly. It could end winning just those two, or winning Picture/Actress/Supporting Actress if things really go in its favor.

A Song of Ice and Fire

10. Squall Leonhart vs. Luigi (2003) R2

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1e7793f7.jpg

Squall Leonhart 60.21% 69958
Luigi 39.79% 46232
TOTAL VOTES 116190
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(6)Squall_Leonhart_vs_(3)Luigi_2003
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1339-north-division-round-2-squall-leonhart-vs-luigi

The contest hierarchy that was partly established with this match proved to be so enduring that I think many people have forgotten how shocking and disorienting this result was when it initially came down. Regardless of how obvious it seems in hindsight, or whether we should have known better or not, it still stands to me as the most shocking upset of all time. Ive already spoken about how pre-contest hype in 03 was dominated by Magus and Kefka, but in terms of newcomers, Luigi was sitting right behind them at #3. He would go on to redeem himself in later years, but initially at least he would wind up being the biggest bust of them all. Coming into 2003 the appeal behind Luigi was obvious and seemingly self-evident. He was a fan favorite Mario character who could get the benefit of all of the series popularity with none of the baggage of Mario himself. He was a lovable loser and underdog favorite on a site populated by users who widely thought of themselves as the same, even before this characterization of Luigi became codified by Nintendo themselves. Expectations for Luigis popularity spanned a wide wide range, and while no one had him challenging Link for the Divisional Championship, Luigi > Samus in the Third Round was considered a sexy upset pick for many. There was some minor debate as to the results of his fourpack, but most people took Luigi to win it without too much of a second thought.

The really debateable match within those four was supposed to be the First Round showdown between Squall and Jill, both veterans of 2002. Jill had the better resume between the two of them, having made the Sweet Sixteen as opposed to Squalls First Round loss, but they were considered evenly matched overall, and this would end up being one of the most hotly debated, evenly split Round 1 matches on the Board. And then Squall went out and beat Jill 60/40 without breaking a sweat, breaking many brackets in the process. Now, in theory, the magnitude of Squalls victory should have been a warning sign, but this was not only before we had the X-Stats, but before we had any real conception of transitivity for contest results. There was no framework for making even rudimentary comparisons between years, or drawing anything more than general conclusions about one characters popularity based on their performance on another. Beating someone by 20 points was no different than beating them by 5, so people just chalked this up as another 1 point win or loss and went on with their day. If anything, the main warning sign occurred during Luigis debut the following day. Expected to completely blow out Ratchet, Luigi started off near 80%, but would end up going on an epic all-day collapse, falling 6 percentage points to only 74% in the end. He remained a massive favorite over Squall in the following round, but the obviousness of his popularity had suddenly come into doubt.

Not all matches of this vintage have the boards predictions preserved for posterity, but in this case, thanks to the Oracle Challenge, we do. The average Oracle prediction for this match was Luigi with 60.01%, and despite being only the third Oracle match ever, it would set a record that stands to this day. After the dust had settled and the final votes had come in, the average Oracle score for the match ended up being a mere 8.13 points, the lowest on record. 13 competitors even received 0 points overall for the match. I know that this statistic is partly due to scoring changes that have taken place over the years, but I mention these numbers to emphasize just how much of a blindside this result was. Luigi did actually start the match off in the leadfor five minutes. And then Squall completely went to town. I dont know how quick the turnaround was or what times he crossed which barriers, but none of that really matters for this match. When all was said and done, the match would end with a 60/40 margin like we all thought. It was just Squall pulling off that kind of victory, not Luigi. Upsets normally come in one of two varieties: a match that we thought would be close ends up with someone getting an easy victory, or a match that we thought would be an easy victory ends up unexpectedly close. This match went beyond even that paradigm. The person that we thought would easily lose was easily winning instead, and the board went crazy.

This was still an era where people responded to match resultsemotionally. But usually that emotion was funnellled into trolling or flaming. This time, people went beyond even that. Several prominent users didnt just mourn Luigis loss, they went out in the most dramatic way possible, committing multiple account suicides througout the day. Most people however, vented their frustrations and confusion through Fanta Shokata, an early meme template, where an Indian commercial for a Fanta product was subtitled with user submitted text. Rarely has the board been so blanketed in a single meme as it was this day, when topic after topic was filled with a series of videos of two Indian gentlemen discussing Squall vs. Luigi.

For anyone trying to do any kind of serious contest analysis, things had become very disorienting. This battle came immediately after Ganondorf Vs. Magus, another match that upended our expectations, but this time instead of a Square character bombing against Nintendo, the situation had reversed itself and the Square character was performing beyond our wildest expectations instead. To have multiple upsets/near upsets occurring in seemingly contradictory directions left us spinning, and there was even serious speculation that Samus might lose to KOS-MOS the following day. Not because of any grand theory that this would have tied into; we just felt that unmoored from what we had come to expect from the contest. Of course things eventually died down and with the benefit of hindsight we gained a clearer understanding of what had transpired in this match. The shocking nature of the result was partly due to a serious overestimation of Luigis potential appeal (the board turned out to be a couple of years ahead of the curve when it came to embracing Luigis scaredy-pants nature), but all analyses would eventually lead back to one principal cause: Kingdom Hearts Factor. Squall/Luigi would end up being the first definitive sign of and one of the key proofs for KHF, one of the definitive Factors in contest history. A boost that many of the FF characters appearing in Kingdom Hearts received, KHF would upend the later rounds of the contest, but more on that later. For now, all that mattered was what it had done for Squall, generally considered to be KHFs biggest beneficiary. This match would prove to be his coming out party, and the FFVIII main would go on to become one of *the* Near Elites, a character who would make the Sweet Sixteen five times, more than any other non-Noble Niner. His popularity has become so taken for granted that it can be hard to remember when it wasnt, when him making the Sweet Sixteen wasnt expected, but was instead one of the most shocking things we had ever seen.

All right, time to get to ~The Top 10~

But first, a recap:

128. Sephiroth vs. Raziel (2003) R1
127. The Legend of Zelda vs. Civilization (2006) R1
126. Link vs. Magus (2003) R3
125. Chrono Trigger vs. Final Fantasy X (2015) R3/Chrono Trigger vs. Super Smash Bros. Melee (2015) R4
124. Tifa Lockheart vs. Vyse (2005) R1
123. Alucard vs. Miles "Tails" Prower (2002) R1/Alucard vs. Duke Nukem (2002) R2
122. Cloud Strife vs. CATS (2003) R1
121. Chrono Trigger vs. Final Fantasy VII (Sp2004) R6
120. Mario vs. Servbot (2002) R1
119. Isaac vs. Pikachu vs. Serge vs. Tidus (2007) R1
118. Super Mario RPG vs. Street Fighter II (Sp2004) R1
117. Tidus vs. Claire Redfield (2002) R1
116. Super Mario Bros. vs. Final Fantasy (2006) R4
115. Master Chief vs. PaRappa vs. Tommy Vercetti vs. Yuna (2007) R1/Master Chief vs. Yuna vs. Liquid Snake vs. Alucard (2007) R2
114. Vincent Valentine vs. Squall Leonhart (2005) R3
113. Final Fantasy X vs. Super Smash Bros. Melee (Sp2004) R3
112. Super Smash Bros. Melee vs. Undertale (2015) R6
111. Knuckles the Echidna vs. Rikku vs. Vaan vs. Yoshi (2007) R1
110. Cloud Strife vs. Sephiroth (2003) R6
109. Golden Sun vs. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Fall 2010) R2
108. Soul Calibur vs. Kingdom Hearts (Spring 2004) R1
107. Link vs. Bidoof vs. Vincent Valentine vs. Zelda (2007) R2
106. Kairi vs. Claire Redfield (Fall 2006) R1
105. Yoshi vs. Dante (Fall 2006) R2
104. Ryu Hayabusa vs. Master Chief (Winter 2010) R2
103. Sora vs. Ryu Hayabusa (2004) R2
102. Metal Gear Solid 3 vs. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion vs. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess vs. Resident Evil 4 (2009) R3
101. Cloud Strife vs. Squirtle vs. Leon Kennedy (2013) R3
100. Cloud Strife vs. Link vs. Mario vs. Samus Aran vs. Sephiroth vs. Solid Snake (Fall 2006) BR Day 1
99. Sephiroth vs. Missingno (Winter 2010) R3
98. Resident Evil 2 vs. Bloodborne (2020) R3/Persona 4 Golden vs. Xenoblade Chronicles (2020) R4
97. Castlevania vs. Halo (2006) R1
96. Zelda: Twilight Princess vs. Resident Evil 4 vs. Super Smash Bros. Brawl vs. Metal Gear Solid 4 (2009) R4
95. Pokemon Gold/Silver/Crystal vs. Xenogears (Sp2004) R1
94. Ganondorf vs. Vincent Valentine (Fall 2006) R1
93. Grand Theft Auto vs. Warcraft (2006) R1
92. Luigi vs. Mudkip vs. Ganondorf vs. Vergil (2007) R2
91. Draven vs. Chie Satonaka vs. Jak (2013) R1
90. Cloud Strife vs. Solid Snake vs. Sephiroth vs. Kirby (2008) R5
89. Crono vs. Dante (2002) R2
88. Undertale vs. Mass Effect 3 (2015) R1
87. Starcraft vs. Kingdom Hearts (Sp2004) R2
86. Amaterasu vs. Draven (2018) R1
85. Mario vs. Link (2002) R6
84. Samus Aran vs. Sephiroth (2002) R4
83. Phoenix Wright vs. Gordon Freeman (Fall 2006) R1
82. Crono vs. Mario (2004) R3
81. Donkey Kong vs. Miles 'Tails' Prower vs. Tidus vs. Weighted Companion Cube (2008) R1
80. Castlevania vs. Kingdom Hearts (2006) R2
79. Ryu vs. Dante (Winter 2010) R2
78. Spyro the Dragon vs. Morrigan Aensland (2002) R1/Terry Bogard vs. Aya Brea (2002) R1
77. Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Mega Man (2005) R4
76. Kirby vs. L-Block vs. Laharl vs. Nathan Hale (2007) R1
75. Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty vs. Shadow of the Colossus (Fall 2010) R2/Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater vs. Shadow of the Colossus (Fall 2010) R4
74. Solid Snake vs. Mega Man (Fall 2006) R4
73. Banjo-Kazooie vs. Perfect Dark vs. Pokemon Red/Blue/Yellow vs. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (2009) R1
72. Ridley vs. Diablo (Spring 2005) R1/M. Bison vs. Diablo (Spring 2005) R2/Kefka vs. Diablo (Spring 2005) R3
71. Mega Man vs. Pikachu (2018) LB/Solid Snake vs. Zelda (2018) LB/Tifa Lockheart vs. Sephiroth (2018) LB
70. Kirby vs. L-Block vs. Kratos vs. Donkey Kong (2007) R2
69. Tifa Lockheart vs. Mega Man X (2018) R3
68. Ryu Hayabusa vs. Jill Valentine (2004) R1
67. Commander Shepard vs. Magus vs. Sandbag vs. Sonic the Hedgehog (2008) R1
66. Dante vs. Amaterasu vs. Leon Kennedy vs. Pikachu (2007) R3
65. Crono vs. Solid Snake (2002) R4
64. Link vs. Cloud Strife (2004) R6
63. Sarah Kerrigan vs. Vincent Valentine (2005) R1
62. Link vs. Ganondorf (2004) R2
61. Final Fantasy VII vs. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past vs. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time vs. Final Fantasy X (2009) R6/Final Fantasy VII vs. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2009) BM
60. Kirby vs. Dante vs. Sephiroth vs. Sonic the Hedgehog (2008) R4
59. Draven vs. Solid Snake vs. Samus Aran (2013) R5
58. Super Mario Bros. vs. The Legend of Zelda vs. Super Mario Bros. 3 vs. Super Mario World (2009) R4
57. Ganondorf vs. Magus (2003) R2
56. Solid Snake vs. Sephiroth (Winter 2010) R5
55. Cloud Strife vs. Sonic the Hedgehog (2003) R4/Mario vs. Sephiroth (2003) R4
54. Bowser vs. Charizard (Winter 2010) R4
53. Mega Man vs. Weighted Companion Cube vs. Solid Snake vs. Zero (2008) R3
52. Cloud Strife vs. Mario (2018) LB
51. Frog vs. Solid Snake (2004) R3

In case anyone is unaware, the comeback described above is not how vote trends generally work, and was seen from the very beginning as the work of a vote stuffer. But to a board desperate for a Kefka win, many didnt care, celebrating Kefkas Barriers whenever they arrived, almost like clockwork, every time. The stop and start nature of the comeback seemed to create a feverish energy in the board the likes of which wed hardly ever seen before, and everyone sat hanging on every single movement of the poll, refreshing and refreshing every chance they got. The Stats and Discussion Topic would become the defacto Update Topic for the match, and we would end up going through 6 Stats Topics in a single day, a record which I believe still stands. Aside from the closeness of the match, the tension was also ratcheted up by the obviousness of the cheating, with many people clamoring for CJay to intervene or make a statement. There was also however, a contingent who insisted up until the end that what we were seeing was not proof of anything suspicious. Comebacks werent perfect they claimed, and Kefkas numbers were statistically sound. I dont know how many lessons that Ive learned from our Contests which Ive ended up taking over with me into the real world, but the most enduring one might be to never just trust something just because of statistics, a lesson I learned thanks to this match.

In any case, despite all efforts to the contrary, by evening, Vercetti had finally, just barely, moved into the lead. And then, after another stallfest between himself and Kefka, the Second Night Vote kicked in, and Kefka started to rebuild his lead all over again. Cheating or not, it now looked as if the Barriers had worked. And then, shortly after midnight EST, with only hours left to go in the match, Ceej would come down from on high and confirm what we had assumed all match. Yes, someone had been stuffing for Kefka, a user named George Romero, and a shocking 1,800 votes would be removed from Kefkas total, putting Vercetti safely in the lead. Also, real-time results for matches would be ended for good, and going forward polls would update in five minute increments, a change which has stuck to this day. A match that had taken all day to play out was now over in a matter of seconds. A cheater had been unmasked, but at least they had given us one hell of a ride, and cemented both Kefka and Vercettis places in contest history.

As a postscript, George Romero would provide a tell-all over AIM where he claimed to also be responsible for almost every controversial match in contest history, stuffing for Samus over Sonic, Mario over Cloud and Crono twice (but stuffing for Crono in his victory over Mario.) As a nice touch, he even claimed to have been stuffing against Starcraft, but that an even more powerful force was pushing back against him. Who knows if any of this was true, but it only added to the mystique of this match.

Prologue - July 25th, 2005 - 11:39 AM PST: During the otherwise uneventful Ganondorf/Yuna match, a post was made in the Stats and Discussion Topic. User Team Rocket Elite had noticed something odd in the match results that were currently playing out. Yuna had gotten a large surge of votes in the 11:00-11:15 AM segment of the match, hundreds of votes more than she should have gotten based on the total amount of votes coming in. Very unusual. Then, exactly one hour later on the dot, the same thing happened. And then one hour after that, it happened yet again. For three hours in a row, at roughly the same time every hour, Yuna would receive a surge of several hundred extra votes. It appeared as if a stuffer was afoot, although why they were bothering to do such a thing in a match that Ganondorf was winning easily was anyones guess. And then, after the third incidence, just as suddenly as the stuffer began, they stopped, and the rest of the match played out without any other suspicious activity. No one quite knew what to make of what had just happened, and some even insisted that what we were seeing was just random variance, unlikely but entirely statistically sound. (Note: Remember this argument for later) But there was of course, the other, more obvious explanation. Someone was seeing if they could stuff votes without getting caught. Someone, it seemed, was practicing. But practicing for what?

11. Kefka vs. Tommy Vercetti (2005) R1

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e5e46309.jpg

Kefka 48.86% 47920
Tommy Vercetti 51.14% 50165
TOTAL VOTES 98085
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(3)Kefka_vs_(6)Tommy_Vercetti_2005
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2084-flood-division-round-1-kefka-vs-tommy-vercetti

Kefka Vs. Vercetti seemed to be a no brainer at first. Vercetti was a notch or two above Kefka in the 2004 X-Stats, even taking into account Kefkas surprisingly strong showing that year, and so, by 2005s logic there was no reason not to pick him. As the match grew closer and closer however, the prediction market started to tighten up. The board loves damning the torpedoes and going full steam ahead when theres any borderline debatable match involving a board favorite, and Kefka was certainly a board favorite. Kefkas matches make no damn sense had not yet become a meme, but he had shown enough variability in the two years since his contest debut that anyone predicting anything in any direction about him was able to find something to hold onto. And then once the match picture got released what had initially seemed like a long shot suddenly looked like a real shot. Lettuce Kefka, for the moment at least, was no more, and with a much more recognizable close up picture, the chances of Kefka pulling off the upset were looking more and more possible. He still faced a two to one deficit in the Oracle Challenge, but things had tightened up in the boards mind, and thats exactly where Kefka needed them to be.

Kefkas matches are always good for a surprise or three, and the opening of this match was no exception. We all knew how beloved Kefka was on the Board, but the Board Vote he got here was truly impressive, taking just over an hour for Kefka to even drop below 55%. While his percentage would drop from there, Kefkas lead would steadily increase all throughout the First Night Vote, and it looked at first like the Kefka supporters would be getting the last laugh on the Statsheads after all. Kefka was up by hundreds of votes all throughout the polls initial hours, and he would keep increasing all the way until 8:00 AM EST, the point at which the Day Vote would finally kick in. But even if it did kick in in Vercettis favor, Kefkas lead had already broken the 1,000 vote mark, and the GTA antihero was looking to have an uphill climp ahead. While Kefka might have been known to have a dismal Day Vote, GTAs track record wasnt much better, and it remained an open question as to how much Vercetti would be able to swing things, and how rapidly he could do it.

Two things became clear once the Morning Vote kicked in: Vercetti was going to be the one winning the Day, but it was not going to be an easy affair. This was not going to be the kind of comeback that was pulled off in an hour or two; this was going to take the entire day. Vercetti would have to take things back vote by vote, minute by minute as the day went on, and we could tell that we were in for a slog of a battle whose tension wasnt about to die down anytime soon. By 8 AM, Vercetti had started stalling, and around 9 AM, his comeback started for good, and for the first two hours, it all seemed to be going well, if not especially quickly. But then, as midday approached, and Vercetti brought Kefkas lead below 800 votes, he would run into a problem. The Barriers had arrived. Just as it was getting started, Vercettis comeback had come to a sudden halt. For the next hour and a half, Kefka would receive a surge of votes that would not only stall the match out, but allow his lead to start creeping back up towards 900 votes again. Eventually, this rush of votes faded away (or was just overwhelmed by the rest of the Day Vote), and Vercetti got back to work on his comeback. Unfortunately for him however, this proved to not be an isolated incident. All throughout the rest of the afternoon and early evening, at various points throughout the comeback, Kefkas numbers would radically improve and he would be able to limit Vercetti to a stall for 30-45 minutes. Then, just as suddenly as the stall started, it would stop, and Vercetti would get back to work tearing off votes at a steady clip. As the day went on these stalls got more frequent, sometimes occurring every time the lead dropped by a hundred votes. Vercetti was trying his best to finish the job, but there was clearly something more powerful going on behind the scenes to prevent him from getting there.

Man

Gram

Despite all that however, we still clung to our sense of normality. Going into the match, despite all we had seen the Block do, Link remained the predicted winner. But deep down, we all had an inkling of what was coming. Look at the Oracle picks. Pick after pick has Link tying with L-Block, or only winning by a few hundredth of a percentage points. These are the predictions that you make when you know the score, but dont want to admit it. On some level, we knew what to expect, what L-Block had done before, but no one was quite prepared for the insanity that was unleashed when the poll finally began. We had grown used to L-Block putting up absurd numbers at the polls start, but these ones were otherworldly. It was pushing 60% one minute in, and even at the freeze it had 54.99% of the vote. Against Link. And Cloud. And Snake. Combined. Five minutes later and L-Blocks percentage dropped, but only by less than 2% to 53.04%, its lead on Link now well over 1,000 votes. It would take 20 minutes for L-Block to finally fall below 50% and hours for it to fall below 40%. One hour in and it was 3,500 votes ahead of Link, not quite doubling him. We had all known that Link could fall, we just didnt know it would happen in such a simple, definitive fashion.

The board, naturally, exploded. Flooded by scores of posts from both regulars and the hordes of people that had been rallied to the site from across the Internet, it proved impossible to keep up. Even on the most maximalist settings the front page only contained posts from the last minute or two, a level of activity we had virtually never seen before. The match, the analysis, the board, it was all spinning away from us, the contest climaxing in the most dramatic way possible. As the day went on, we gradually recovered, as did the match itself, with L-Block falling back down to Earth, at least as much as it could after the start it had gotten. Link would never come close to it, losing by over 7,000 votes, only really mustering a comeback during the Morning Vote. The matchs results would end up being the main attraction in and of themselves instead of any dramatic way they played out, and that was for the best I suppose, since those results were dramatic enough. Dramatic, and popular. We routinely saw matches this year get votals of 130-140k votes, but this match would top them all. It would take less than an hour to match the totals of a match from our most recent contest, and when all was said and done, this match would get *195,000* votes, a staggering figure that has never been matched, not even by the megarallies of later years.

To say that people were conflicted about the results would be an understatement. Yes, it was hard not to be bothered by the massive amount of trolls pouring into the site, mocking our contest, and celebrating L-Blocks victory. On the other hand, L-Block was a site creation, a joke that we had all embraced well before the rest of the Internet caught on. It had gotten away from us in the end, but it was also a GameFAQSer at heart. It wasnt an outside invader like Draven or Starcraft or Undertale, regardless of how many fans the latter two games might have had on the site. It was the most hilarious contest run we had ever seen, until all of a sudden it wasnt. While we had loved L-Block all the way to the Finals, once it actually made it there and won, a fear emerged that this was the end of the contests for good. Once you vote for a Tetris piece as your favorite video game character, its hard to for a site to ever take such contests seriously again. This isnt the kind of thing you come back from. But, for a time at least, thats exactly what we did. The only thing more shocking than the fact that it took this long for such a rally to happen was how quickly things went back to normal afterwards. We did go home again, to use a cliche. And so in hindsight, especially post-2013, L-Block was looked back on fondly after all. Was it a portent of things to come, both on GameFAQS and on the Internet writ large? Probably, but we still had some time left. We hadnt quite gotten there yet.

12. Link vs. Cloud Strife vs. L-Block vs. Solid Snake (2007) R6

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/7/705bed9c.jpg

Link 29.74% 58100
Cloud Strife 24.49% 47834
L-Block 33.51% 65462
Solid Snake 12.27% 23964
TOTAL VOTES 195360
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Link_vs_Cloud_Strife_vs_L-Block_vs_Solid_Snake_2007
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2925-tournament-final-link-cloud-l-block-snake

GameFAQS, for many years, was an island unto itself. It wasnt that the site didnt mirror greater trends in both gaming culture and the Internet at large, or that we werent evolving the same as the rest of the world was. We just went at things at our own pace, with our own built in biases affecting the speed at which things moved. This was a site whose definitive gaming rivalry was Mario Vs. Crono after all. We were just built different. People talk about how old-fashioned GameFAQS is and how that drives people away, but what that conversation misses is that GameFAQS has *always* been old-fashioned. I joined the site in 2002, and I dont think there was ever a point at which people werent complaining that the message board system was horribly out of date. But for many users, thats what they liked about the site. Or at the very least they didnt mind it enough to leave. And this created a large, resident, userbase with unusual tastes that operated at a large enough scale to push back against some of the excesses of the rest of the Internet. On the rest of the Internet, the process of holding polls, or even running an entire contest oftentimes ran into problems. Griefers or trolls would frequently overwhelm voting, pushing some offensive or humorous option to the top, just for the lulz if nothing else. Time Magazine opened their Person of the Year decision to a public vote on multiple occasions, and on multiple occasions 4chan or some other group would sabotage the process, voting for someone like moot, and causing Time to just dismiss the results altogether. And then there were Gamespots own attempts at Character Battles, which almost immediately descended into rallying, trolling, and company promotion. While rallying has been a topic of contention, and has influenced matches from the very first contest, GameFAQS had managed to avoid being overwhelmed by it entirely, never suffering the descent into chaos that almost every other online popularity poll seemed to undergo. Why was that? Im not entirely sure, but it was at least partly due to the size of the site and the number of users regularly voting in our polls. The site might have been quirky, but it was also fairly massive, and for a while, that worked. The proudly old-fashioned users of the site were a buffer against some of the Internets trends, both toxic and otherwise, and the prospect of a contest being taken over by some kind of joke rally was out of mind. That just wasnt something that we did.

That is, until L-Block. Sure we had seen epic, non-joke runs like Crono in 02 or Starcraft in 04, but they always ran out of steam before the end, the proper order of the site always snapping back into place. These kinds of runs mattered at the margins; they didnt dictate contest winners. Even by 07 there was still a school of thought that characters didnt gain all that much strength from momentum. Maybe a little bit; a 55/45 match can be brought down to 50/50, but that was it. The idea that someone could go from being 60/40d by Kirby to challenging Link, based primarily on momentum and bandwagoning, would have gotten you laughed out of any discussion topic you brought it up in. Even a potential offsite rally would be limited in the amount it could swing, especially with the kind of votals we were seeing in 2007. But, previously unbelievable or not, this was the situation we had found ourselves in going into the Final Match of 2007.

L-Block had busted things up entirely, both in terms of brackets as well as in what we thought contest entrants were capable of. It had seemingly increased in popularity, not just once by a small amount, but by dramatic amounts each and every round. There was a theory at the time that said the issue was not so much that L-Block was increasing in strength but that there was 29% of the site that would vote for it no matter what, and so as its opponents got stronger, L-Block would appear stronger and stronger as well. I dont think anyone believes this anymore, but L-Block did get 29% every single round, so this made a kind of sense at the time. In any case, the end result was that L was getting stronger and stronger and stronger with seemingly no end in sight. And this increase in strength was only compounded by the outside attention that our contest was now receiving. We were used to various fansites posting a link to a GameFAQS match every now and then, but what we were seeing now went beyond all that. Major news sites like Kotaku were writing articles about the Tetris Block that was tearing through the bracket, one more story about an increasingly absurdist Internet that played by its own rules and enjoyed thumbing its nose at anyone who thought it could take things seriously. Like it or not, the lulz had finally come for us too.

Still don't know what The Kitchen is.

I'm still annoyed that CJay (or whomever set up the bracket in '07) completely missed the point on *both* Jay Solano and Midgar Zolom.

This is so egregious that I love it, but in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer" the plot twist hinges on the audience not knowing what the actual capital of Brazil is. I mean, I guess it still kind of worked, because when I saw the movie, knowing the real capital didn't make me figure things out, I just went "Wow, the filmmakers are really lazy. They didn't even bother checking this."

I might be misremembering details, but what I believe happens is that the main characters think they are calling into a radio trivia contest, where in order to win a Caribbean vacation they have to name the capital of Brazil. They answer Rio de Janeiro, which is wrong, but are told but are told that they are the winners, and the killer somehow sets up the trip anyway. It turns out that this was all some elaborate scheme to get them trapped on a tropical island, and Jennifer Love Hewitt figures it out because she sees a globe/atlas while running from the killer and sees that Brasilia is the actual capital of Brazil. I might be making that last part up/I might have dreamed it, but I love it so much that I hope that's how it really gets revealed.

Edit: I don't want to come across like I'm saying there's anything wrong with not knowing the capital of Brazil. I just think it's silly that the filmmakers apparently thought that it was some obscure piece of trivia that no one could possibly be expected to know.

And then, as the match reached the peak of the First Night Vote, Cronos collapse would begin. Sonic took off a couple hundred votes in an hour or two, a very worrying sign, but Crono struck back somewhat with the Morning Vote. His percentage would continue to collapse, but Crono would manage to limit things to a stall, keeping his lead at just under 2,000 votes for a couple of hours. Sonic would be coming back, that was no longer in doubt, but it was now just on Crono to hold off that moment for as long as possible. By 10:30/11:00 AM, his strength would finally give out and Crono would be forced to lower his guard, allowing Sonic to take control of the match for good and unleash one of the most memorable comebacks in contest history. Sonic would make cuts quickly and steadily all throughout the midday, people rapidly calculating afer each one to see at what time Soinc would be expected to take the lead, and whether or not Crono would have any time left to reverse things in the polls final hours. And then the ASV arrived, and all those calculations and all the bargaining from Crono fans would go completely out the window. Sonic was dominating the period as much as Crono had dominated the early going, cutting down the lead by near 100 votes in a single update at times. This wasnt a comeback so much as a complete reversal, and all of the speculation about a down to the wire result came to nothing as Sonic would instead breeze into the lead by 4:20 PM, with hours and hours to spare. Sonic wouldnt stop there however. He would keep going, up to the very end of the match, eventually winning by 1,940 votes, a roughly 4,000 vote shift from earlier in the day. For the first, and only, time in contest history, Sonic had beaten another member of the Noble Nine.

This match would symbolize the beginning of the end for Crono, who would go on to suffer a series of unfortunate upsets and reversals in the following years, and even Sonics triumph would end up being short lived, his popularity collapsing just one year later. While the boards sentiment has always leaned unwaveringly towards Crono, it was hard not to take some kind of joy in the momentousness of this result, along with the one from the day before. The Noble Nine had finally each beaten one of the other members, and the increasingly static ordering of its lineup had been shaken up for good. It was hard not to feel like we were at a turning point for the Contests after this point, albeit in what direction was still unclear. Thanks to some of the Main Brackets final results, the Noble Nine now formed a circular chain of victories with: Link > Sephiroth > Samus > Snake > Mega Man > Sonic > Crono > Mario > Cloud > Link > Sephiroth The Noble Nine was now joined together in a way that they had never been before and it was appropriate that this would happen in this year, in a contest, that marked the end of one era of contest history, the other era just beyond the horizon in 2007.

13. Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Crono (2006) R4

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/5/5d18ec5e.jpg

Sonic the Hedgehog 50.77% 64027
Crono 49.23% 62087
TOTAL VOTES 126114
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Sonic_the_Hedgehog_vs_(1)Crono_2006
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2558-tournament-quarterfinal-sonic-the-hedgehog-vs-crono

Going into 2006, a controversy was swirling through the Noble Nine. The concept was premised, at least partly, on the idea that the group of characters within it were unbeatable to everyone else in the bracket, and only beatable to themselves. As the years went on, it became harder and harder to ignore that the two weak links of the group (Snake and Sonic), while above the rest of the bracket, had actually never beaten another Noble Nine Character themselves. And this wasnt a recent development; it had been the state of play since the end of 2003. What made these two different than say, Vincent? Their presence in the group was starting to become premised more on vibes than on actual contest results. Both of them had looked pretty good in 2005, but when in came to intra-Noble Nine struggles the two of them had yet to finish the deal. The Noble Nine had, in many peoples minds begun to calcify into a group of three tiers: Link, Cloud, Sephiroth at the top, Mario, Samus, Crono, Mega Man in the middle, and then Sonic and Snake bringing up the rear. Yes, I know that Sonic had almost beaten Mega Man the year before, but when it came to the Noble Nine, almost wasnt good enough. There was some deal of debate when the bracket for 2006 came out, but aside from a healthy argument about whether Samus or Crono would win the Main Bracket, the previously stated tiers held. For the Male Bracket we would see: Mega Man > Snake, Crono > Sonic, and then Crono > Mega Man, just like the year before. The order of everyone had been set in stone, or so we thought. Little did we know that we were on the verge of the greatest reordering of the Noble Nine since the early years of the Contests.

From the beginning, we realized that something was off in the Male Bracket. Mega Man in particular was one of our first objects of interest. While he had grown to have a reputation as Mr. Consistency in these things, in match after match he was underperforming, while Snake, who the Blue Bomber had already beaten twice, managed to hit his marks every single time. An upset in the making was brewing, and eager for some excitement in a contest we had low expectations for, the board began speculating on a narrow Snake upset. And then there was Crono. It wasnt so much that Cronos performances were as bad as Megas, but he had started to develop a nasty habit of collapsing completely as the match went on. Whether it was due to the shift in the time the polls started or because of the arrival of a new group of casual voters, he had the misfortune in match after match of starting off very strong for the first hour or two, and then seeing his lead completely collapse throughout the remaining 22-23 hours of the match. His initial results werent setting off any red flags, but his Vote Trends were beginning to make people speculate as to how big a lead hed need to get on Sonic in their upcoming showdown. And then, in his Third Round match with Auron, he had a legitimately bad result. Crono could only manage to break 54% against someone he was supposed to beat much more easily. And much like before, while he started out 60/40ing his opponent, he collapsed over the course of the day, struggling to even beat Auron outright during the ASV. On the heels of both this performance, as well as Mega Mans equally underwhelming victory over Sora two days prior, the predictable Male Bracket was thrown into chaos, and Snake and Sonic were on the verge of pulling off back to back upsets. While it had been swirling around in the background for the past 2-3 years, it suddenly looked like the problem with the Noble Nine could be solved in the span of just two days.

As Ive written about previously, when it came time for Snake to do his part he did so with ease, defeating Mega Man by a large enough margin to make himself the favorite to win the Main Bracket. Despite Cronos bomb in the previous round though, Sonic still had his work cut out for him. Snake had managed to draw Mega Man into a statistical tie prior to their match, but when it came to Sonic/Crono, the board stubbornly continued to back Crono. The Oracle numbers were a bit closer than previously predicted, but Crono remained the favorite all the same. The anticipation of an upset was in our hearts, but we couldnt yet bring ourselves to logically believe it. The match started, and as expected Crono got off to an early lead. He remained very consistent in the early going, at just over 54% for the first several hours. One hour in, his lead broke 1,000, two hours in, he was at 1,500. This was, by any previous estimation, a very good place to be. But still, Cronos previous matches this year remained in the back of our minds, a nagging doubt that all of this early lead might not be enough. If Crono fell off by as much as he had beenit might not be enough. He needed to build up a firewall during this period, and while he had a decent sized cushion going, he was still facing the prospect of a 50/50 result once the Day Vote rolled in and erased it all. He had to keep pushing. Three and a half hours in, the lead broke 2,000, eventually peaking at just over 2,220 votes a couple hours later. If Sonic wanted to win, hed have to overcome a bigger deficit than any other match winner in history. The opportunity was there, but his chances of taking it were slowly slipping away.

In one of the original Oz books, The Land of Oz, the characters encounter a container of Wishing Pills that can only be used after someone "counts to 17 by twos," posing a riddle that the characters are initially unable to solve. The solution to the riddle makes absolutely no sense, and this has infuriated me since childhood. I remember coming across the archives online of some sort of discussion group that was going through each book in order, and I was excited to figure out what the solution actually meant, and their response to the issue was just "lol, makes no sense." Ahhh!

I'll post a quote below from the scene from where they solve it, because it truly makes no sense.

Why not start counting at a half of one? asked the Saw-Horse, abruptly. Then anyone can count up to seventeen by twos very easily.
They looked at each other in surprise, for the Saw-Horse was considered the most stupid of the entire party.
You make me quite ashamed of myself, said the Scarecrow, bowing low to the Saw-Horse.
Nevertheless, the creature is right, declared the Woggle-Bug; for twice one-half is one, and if you get to one it is easy to count from one up to seventeen by twos.

...

Count! cried the Scarecrow.
One-half, one, three, five, seven, nine, eleven, counted Tip. thirteen, fifteen, seventeen.

Why are you allowed to just start at a fraction? How is going "One-half, one.." counting by twos? That's not counting by twos! That's not counting by twos!

Learn to

14. Chrono Trigger vs. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (Sp2004) R4

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/eeb9a152.jpg

Chrono Trigger 50.18% 49494
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past 49.82% 49132
TOTAL VOTES 98626
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Chrono_Trigger_vs_(6)The_Legend_of_Zelda:_A_Link_to_the_Past_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1658-division-final-chrono-trigger-vs-the-legend-of-zelda-a-link

Dividing the first two Games Contests by era is generally regarded as a mistake. It placed restrictions on which games could get in, generated a lot of SFF matches, and removed suspense from later rounds in many regions of the bracket. There were a handful of bright spots to that format however. Longstanding rivalries got to play out on a bigger stage, some series got multiple opportunities to shine, etc. One of those bright spots was, of course, this match, the finals of the 16 Bit Division. From the very beginning, this matchup has hyped. Two of the definitive games of their era, classics by any stretch of the imagination, facing off in a Square vs. Nintendo battle for the ages. Rather than everything settling into a comfortable mediocrity, everything in the 16 Bit Divison had fallen into place for an alltimer of a match, an answer to a generational question that had been debated for over 10 years. It was also, in many ways, the last stand for the Zelda series in this contest. While the All Zelda Final Four had been hyped up and memed since the First Round of the contest, we were on the verge of seeing all four Zelda games eliminated virtually back to back in the space of five days. LttP would not be the last Zelda game remaining; that honor would go to Ocarina of Time on the following day. OoTs chances against FFVII were considered quite slim at this point though, and if the Zelda series wanted to have an entry make it to the final rounds, LttP was considered its best chance. In other words, for Nintendo fans all over the site, there was a lot riding on this match.

Going into the contest, both of these games were given pretty good odds to win the Division, however, despite the initial Zelda hype, by the time match rolled around Chrono Trigger had emerged as the favorite. Both games had been expected to win their previous matches by roughly the same amount, but the actual results could not have been more different. Chrono Trigger smashed Super Mario World with ease in a 60/40 victory that would hide the latter games popularity for years. Link to the Past on the other hand had had its hands full with FFVI, having to rely on the Day Vote to put the Squaresoft classic away. After Kefkas bomb in the 03 Contest, the board had gone sour on FFVIs popularity vis-a-vis Chrono Triggers, and if LttP struggled to put away the former, it would almost certainly face an uphill battle against Chrono Trigger itself. That was the logic at least, and while people were still expecting a reasonably close match between the two of them, most people were fairly sanguine about Chrono Triggers chances.

The match started and initially at least the pre-match predictions held out. Chrono Trigger got off to a close but relatively safe early lead, staying above 54% for the first hour or two. Things started to slow down for it though as we reached the nadir of the First Night Vote, CT still increasing its lead, but starting to sink in percentage as we neared the beginning of the Day Vote. It would gradually build up its lead to 500 votes by 7:00 AM, but almost as soon as it reached that number, the kiddies would start waking up, and LttP would use the Morning Vote to come back, taking votes off the lead bit by bit throughout the day. As we hit midday, just past noon EST, Zelda would complete the job, pulling into a dead heat with CT, the vote sitting at 50/50 for each game. And then, for the next 10 hours it would stay there, frozen in place as the board was the exact opposite, convulsing in excitement, waiting for one of the games to make its move. But no move would come, the two games trading the lead back and forth for hours on end, the lead barely rising above the single digits. LttP would make a bit of a run with the ASV, but even that lead stalled out at just under 200 votes, Chrono Trigger quickly taking it all back by evening and setting into place another endless stallfest. The barely kept secret of course was how the match would end. We all assumed that Chrono Trigger would finish well as it and its characters usually did, so the onus was on LttP to put enough daylight between itself and its opponent to withstand what would be coming later on. The main source of tension throughout this endless day was whether or not the Zelda game had enough juice left to build up any kind of substantial lead that could stand up against the upcoming Night Vote.

And in the end, it did not. The two games remained locked in a stalemate all through the early evening, until around 10 PM EST, when finally, finally, one of them would take control of the match. Chrono Trigger would win the Second Night Vote decisively as we all expected and that would be just enough to put it over the top, squeaking through into the Seminfals, and as we all expected, the Finals as well.

Chrono Trigger and its characters would go on to have many successes after this match. Hell, Frog hadnt even made his contest debut yet. Even so, this match was in many ways CTs high water mark on the site. It had faced down the top Zelda/Nintendo game in its generation, and come out of the battle alive. It would go on to put up a good fight in the Finals as well, establishing itself as the #3 game on the site. The next Games Contest in 2009 would not be a successful one for Chrono Trigger, even with the game finally being released in Europe, and while it looked strong in Best.Game.Ever. III, it would ultimately be overwhelmed by one of the contests rallies, its true potential unfulfilled. And so it is left for this match to secure the legacy of Chrono Trigger the game, and in its victory it managed to do so, while at the same time providing one of the most entertaining matches in contest history.

Border

ctesjbuvf posted...

You accidentally wrote Samus by the total votes.

Thank you! Changed.

15. Mario vs. Crono (2002) R5

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/9/96b608e7.jpg

Mario 50.05% 53831
Crono 49.95% 53716
TOTAL VOTES 107547
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Mario_vs_(5)Crono_2002
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1000-tournament-semifinal-mario-vs-crono

The question of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object found an answer in this match: it creates the most definitive rivalry in Contest History. This legendary rivalry would begin with two characters who, while they might have shared momentum, had managed to make it to this point with diametrically opposed backstories. Mario was the big favorite, the obvious winner who had looked shaky early on, but who had managed to get to this point seemingly by sheer brute force of will. Crono was someone who many expected to lose in the Second Round, but who had defied the odds and beat gaming icon after gaming icon on his way to the Final Four. Sometimes when you get a showdown between contest elites, one or both of them is not at the top of their game. That was not the case here. Both Mario and Crono were coming off of huge waves of momentum going into this match, and while Marios strength might have peaked with his match the round before, what he was working with here was still ahead of what he looked like in the earliest rounds. Crono of course, seemingly got more and more popular as the contest went on, most likely peaking with this very match. And so you had two characters, in the midst of two different journeys meeting up to decide which one would make the Finals. Even if Mario and Cronos story together ended here, it would be a story that would be hard to beat.

While the board was mostly rooting for Crono all the way at this point, most people, when pushed, would concede that the match was Marios to lose. In most peoples minds he had already overcome his biggest obstacle the previous round when he had defeated Cloud to win the North Division. The appeal behind another intense match in the Nintendo Vs. Square rivalry was obvious, but Crono was considered a step down from Cloud popularity wise. If the former couldnt take on Mario, how could Crono be expected to? The match started, and while Mario was in the lead from the very beginning, it quickly became clear that Crono was not yet done surprising us. As Midnight turned into Night, and Night turned into Day, Mario would remain ahead, but not by much, Crono nipping at his heels the entire time. This was in an era before we understood things like Vote Trends, and which characters were supposed to do better in which time period. Anything was possible, and the board sat with bated breath, waiting to see when and if either of these two would make a move. But neither did. Mario kept plodding along hour after hour, adding to his lead narrowly but consistently, and by 6:00 PM, he had managed to build up a roughly 1200 vote lead. In later contests with a 12/1 AM start time, these final six hours or so would be a moment when things mostly (emphasis on *mostly*) start to die down. If a comeback hadnt started yet, it probably wasnt going to, and in any case, coming back by 1,000+ votes at this point was a bridge too far, even in the most extreme of circumstances. 2002 was built different, however. This time frame was when most of the big comebacks of the contest had occurred, and as the minutes ticked by, it was up to Crono to show whether or not he would be the next character to close things out with an epic run.

He would. With only a quarter of the match left to go, Crono began coming back, tearing down the lead faster than Mario had built it up. In a role reversal from what we had seen in the previous round, Mario was now the one facing down a quickly evaporating lead, holding on for dear life as his opponent went on a legendary tear. Hour by hour, Crono cut off votes, eventually bringing the match close to 50/50 with only two hours to go. And then, for the first time ever in contest history, Ceej arrived to tell us that he had found a cheater. And despite what everyone at the time might have assumed, they were not cheating for Mario. Someone had managed to set up a voting script for Crono, and as a result, Crono would see 490 votes removed from his total right as he was on the cusp of taking the lead. Mario fans would erupt in cheers, but only temporarily. Even without the stuffed votes, Cronos momentum was building, and in no time at all, he close the remaining distance between himself and the Nintendo icon. With only an hour or two left to go in the poll, Crono had taken the lead. We were on the verge of seeing the upset of the contest, we were about to see Mario finally fall. Mario wouldnt go down without a fight however, and for the limited amount of time left in the poll, the two would trade places back and forth, every update seeing a new character in the lead. In the penultimate update, with only 15 minutes to go, Crono would just barely be up, holding at 50.03%. Would that be enough to hold on until the end?

No, as it turned out, it would not. In what would become an increasingly common event, Mario would pull out a strong final update, and end up just barely winning himself in the end. Crono had proved his strength beyond any reasonable standard of doubt, but in the end, Mario would be the one making the finals, not him. The battle had been won, but, as Im sure you all know, the war was far from over. These two characters would meet again and again in a series of clashes, one a year for the next four straight years, the ups and downs of those results serving as a mirror to the site itself. Their rivalry was always rooted in the characters, but it is hard not to see the parallels as well to the overall Nintendo Vs. Square battle for dominance over the soul of the site. Just because both of these battles ended up with definitive winners however, doesnt make them all the less legendary. There are many questions of opinion that can be asked about the contests, and they all produce a variety of answers, all questions except one: What is the greatest contest rivalry? The answer to that question is, quite simply, Mario and Crono. There is almost nothing else that compares. The showdowns themselves and the narrative that they produced. And it all started with this match.

LusterSoldier posted...

It appears there is in fact vote stuffing from the New Jersey stuffer, this time for Zelda. 74.19% in New Jersey is unusually high.

The stuffing wouldn't have been easy to notice going off the early result as is it generally expected that Zelda would dominate the early vote.

I am a bit surprised the stuffer has chosen Zelda this time as the previous 2 polls suggested the stuffer had an anti-winner bias and was attempting to change the winner of the poll by vote stuffing. Going with Zelda simply reinforces a game that could have been expected to win the poll. With Astro Bot keeping it this close, perhaps the game might actually be winning if not for the vote stuffing.

The NJ numbers for Zelda are much lower now. It's still disproportionately high (38%), but it might have just been a flukey early vote. California's Astro Bot numbers for example are also lopsided, but in the other direction.

Do you even have to ask? If this match marked the return of Evil Mario, it would obviously end, as those matches always did, with Mario pulling out a clutch to win, this time by a mere 19 votes. Mario would have, in the end, one final trick up his sleeve. We were all angry of course, but honestly, could this have ever ended any other way? Deep down, if we had known we would likely never have a Character Battle ever again, that this would be our last all-timer match, would we want it to end any other way? The Last Great Contest Match had finally come to a close.

16. Mario vs. Samus Aran II (2018) LB

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1582427e.png

Mario 50.03% 14343
Samus Aran 49.97% 14324
TOTAL VOTES 28667
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(7)Mario_vs_(2)Samus_Aran_(Losers_Bracket)_2018
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7383-loser-bracket-round-4-mario-vs-samus

When I was in high school, a friend of mine was in a conversation with someone from another school who was talking about an upcoming sports match against their rival. When it came time for my friend to provide information about our own schools rivalry, they just shrugged and said Everyones our rival. That sentiment was true for Mario as well, at least during the classic years of the Character Battles. While his rivalry with Crono might be his most obvious and iconic, Mario had areputation in the early years of the contests, and just as controversy followed him in those years, so did a string of rivals. You wouldnt believe it if youd only started following contests post 2006 or so, but Mario was the closest that GameFAQS had to a real villain in the early years. While Marios defeat of Samus in 05 wasnt disputed in any way like some of his other matches, the result had still produced a wealth of bad feelings across the board. Feelings that would eventually dissipate over the course of time. Or, so we thought.

As the years turned into a decade (or two), much of the frenzied chaos of the early contests died away. As the Contest Fanbase stabilized and grew older, we all (for the most part) mellowed out, and learned not to put quite so much emotional investment into the results of an online video game character popularity contest. This helped avoid and dial down the recriminations and grudges that had haunted the classic era, but at the same time, the excitement and thrills of that era had proved hard to recapture as well. The first handful of nailbiters we ever saw, the first matches with comebacks, those all loom large in the boards memory, their legacy undeniable, and they all placed highly on this list. But after 15 years of matches, after all weve seen, would the same match have the same effect? Would DK/Vercetti make my Top 50 if it happened today? Probably not. Weve gone over the same ground so many times, that a match needs something special to stand out nowadays. Theres a rawness to the early matches thats hard to get, and which by 2018 we had come to believe was gone for good. The 2018 Contest, however, ended up exceeding our relatively modest expectations, and when all was said and done would end up being a perfect capper on Character Battle history. There werent the same number of all-time matches with high stakes as in some of our other classic contests, but what we got was a contest that was entertaining and surprising in its own right. We got the closure we needed after five years of rallies, and for a brief moment in the final week or two of the Legends/Losers Bracket we got a return to the excitement of the early years. After a decade of rehabilitating his image, Mario would make a heel turn once more and prove that he had some controversy left in him. Mario the Villain was back, for one final time.

As soon as the Legends Bracket was released, it was clear that Mario and Samus would be having at least one run-in. In theory, this was nothing to get excited about. We had had the debate about the Nintendo hierarchy a decade earlier, and we had seen how it had all turned out. Still, there was something in the air in 2018, that made people hope, if not very confidently, that this time might be different. We were older, more refined, did we really still care about hierarchies that much? Mario had a fairly strong victory over Sephiroth in the first round of the Legends Bracket, avenging his own losses from previous years, and going into the first match with Samus, he was the clear favorite. As expected, Mario won the match, but one element would end up being unexpected. It was close. Mario had remained in control of the match for the whole time, but he only won with 51%, and Samus had even started to make a small run on him in the closing hours. This changed everything. Samus had lost, but there was an extremely good chance that the two would meet up again, and shed get a second chance to pull off the upset. We would see Mega Man reverse a loss to Pikachu the following day, and Mario hadnt won by that much, so wasnt a narrow Samus win a possibility in the rematch? Whatever had caused Marios blowout in 2005, call it SFF or rSFF, it had clearly faded with time. You dont always get a second chance to win an argument, but the people on the losing side of one of the biggest debates in contest history were suddenly on the verge of getting a second chance to win theirs. Finally, 13 years later, a match between Mario and Samus would be decided by raw strength. The only question remaining was, which one was stronger?

We would get our answer 6 days later, when the rematch commenced, and over the course of the week leading up to it, the board turned on Mario in a major way. All that anger and resentment that had been directed towards him for the first several years of the contests was back, and Mario was once again someone whose loss was greatly anticipated. It turned out that maybe we hadt quite gotten over our old grudges after all. This energy and excitement carried over into the rematch, which got off to a narrow start, the two Nintendo icons going 50/50 with each other for the first two hours of the poll. Considering that Mario had done better with the Early Vote in their first match, this only boded well for Samuss chances as the match went on. Eventually, as the Night Vote kicked in, Samus gained the momentum and slowly started to build a lead. As the night grew later, her lead began to reach triple digits, and while she was far from out of the woods yet, we were seeing the first sign that the dream might actually be happening, and that the Nintendo hierarchy might finally be dead. Mario would strike back with the Morning Vote however, tearing down Samuss lead and building up a triple digit one of his own.This was the kind of back and forth between contest elites that we had lived for once upon a time, and which had been in short supply over the past decade. People were actually excited and angry and arguing about a match, and not because there was some rally with existential stakes happening. This was all being done over a good, old-fashioned nailbiter. There was something at stake of course, but it was something constructive, not destructive.

Just like she had done in the first match, Samus would come back with the Afternoon Vote, bringing the match 50/50 with just five and a half hours to go. And for those five and a half hours, the match would remain 50/50, swinging back and forth as each character would go on a run, then stop as the other character swooped in, cancelled out the run and went on one of their own. The only question left to answer was who would have the final run.

According to Geolocation results, Like a Dragon got 69.33% of the vote in New Jersey yesterday. I wonder if someone was proxy voting for it there.

As stunning as the result was, it was relatively clear what had caused it, even if the scale of Maguss 03 overperformance was hard to grasp. Thanks to all the Magus/Squall debate, we knew that there was a chance Magus had been overrated, but we had no clue that it had been by this much. Even though the Link/Magus result didnt have a very good explanation behind it, we understood that flukes can happen, and that there is a degree of year to year variability when it comes to X-Stats results. What happened in this match however, was far beyond some annual volatility, and called into question how we were predicting matches in the first place. The match wasnt necessarily a serious blow to the infallibility of the X-Stats, since after all the Magus is overrated argument itself had relied on that kind of extrapolation of results, but it certainly called into question how much confidence we should all be placing in our received expertise. The match had been an upset among overall bracketmakers as well, but not a unanimous one. 35% of the site had correctly predicted Knuckles to win. Once the shock of it wore off, the boards reaction shifted more towards embarrassment. How could we not have seen this coming?

The aftermath among users would be nothing of course when compared to the aftermath that hit Magus himself. He had been exposed as a fraud in the most dramatic way possible, his reputation destroyed instantaneously. Magus was not just a bracket favorite, but a personal favorite for the board as well, having been voted as the Boards favorite VG character for the second time in a row only a month before this match took place, and that intensified the reaction all the more. When all was said and done, his strength this year probably wasnt even *that* far off from where we had thought it should be, but Maguss role as *The* Noble Nine Breaker in the boards imaginary, along with the affection the board held for him, was so strong that even this mild drop seemed precipitous. And while Magus might have still looked strong in 05, first round loss aside, the same could not be said for him in subsequent years, as in contest after contest he would lose and be upset in increasingly embarrassing ways. A character who was once thought to be capable of beating Snake, by 2013, had people doubting whether or not he could beat Otacon. Never has a character fallen so far in our estimation, and it all started with this match.

17. Magus vs. Knuckles the Echidna (2005) R1

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3fe8debd.jpg

Magus 49.14% 50153
Knuckles the Echidna 50.86% 51909
TOTAL VOTES 102062
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(3)Magus_vs_(6)Knuckles_the_Echidna_2005
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2088-devil-division-round-1-magus-vs-knuckles-the-echidna

Nobody saw it coming. Thats a phrase that gets thrown around all the time when discussing upsets, but its usually an exaggeration. Theres always some core group of people, no matter how small, who were sniffing around the upset, even if very few of them were willing to take a risk and pick it. Magus/Knuckles was different. OK, sure, Smurf did predict it, but hes a Sonic fanboy, so who knows how much though was put into that prediction. Absolutely no one that was thinking critically about this match had any idea that its result was a possibility. It was a shock out of the blue, made even more stunning by the fact that it wasnt some newcomer or unknown quality that was involved. It was two contest mainstays who took us all by surprise, and forced us to reevaluate how accurate all of our received wisdom was. That helped up the ante even more and helped transform the match from a simple upset, no matter how unexpected, into a match that tied into narratives and character journeys that would span close to 20 years.

Ive written at length so far about Maguss journey through contest history. Im sure its repetitive, but its hard not to pay a bit of extra attention to Magus, the character who has one of the most memorable narratives in contest history. Going into 2005, he was still riding high in the initial stage of his journey though, widely considered to be the strongest character not in the Noble Nine, and one of the only ones with the capacity to break it. And this wasnt based on speculation or dodgy math; it was based off of a direct 1v1 match against Link himself. Even the lol, xstats crew would find that hard to argue against. But yet, there were signs that something was off with that result. While Magus himself would only have two inscrutable matches in 04, the other characters from his 03 fourpack (Ganondorf, Tidus, Sam Fisher) all had underperformances that following year. Even though there was no strong explanation provided as to why, it began to be speculated that Maguss 35% against Link was an overperformance, and, as if to test that theory, a Round 2 Match was set up in 05 between Magus and Squall, seemingly settling once and for all the debate as to who was the strongest Near Elite.

The board by and large sided with Magus, and much has been made over the years of this being the defining example of board groupthink and of ignoring the obvious signs that were staring everyone right in the face. That is certainly true to an extent, and whenever a result that hinted at Maguss weakness was brought up, people would dismiss it with an excuse. What makes this different from other groupthink situations though, is that those excuses werent just a cope; there were a lot of legitimate counters that were brought up, and seemingly contradictory results that dont have a good explanation. Ive tried not to get into the nitty gritty of re-litigating match debates from 20 years ago, but I think for this match its relevant just to demonstrate the sheer volume of coincidences that had to pile up in order to hide Maguss weakness.

First off, one of the big points against Maguss 03 value being legitimate was Tiduss weaker than expected performance against Mega Man in 04. But the thing is, if that match went against his value from 03, his Round 1 match did the exact opposite. Tidus was expected, based on the 03 stats, to have a 50/50 match with Shadow, and thats exactly what he did. It just so happened that Shadows value in 03 was also inflated for unclear reasons, for exactly the same amount. Plus, going back even further, Tiduss 02 X-Stat value was inflated as well, making the 03 value look more legitimate. Didnt Ganondorf do a little worse than expected against Alucard in 04? Sure, but due to Twilight Princess and Villain Contest hype, Ganondorf eventually boosted to his inflated 03 value anyway, once again appearing to legitimize his 03 value. Even matches that didnt directly involve any of the characters in that four pack played a role. Did Sam Fisher look weaker than he should have in 04? Sure, and while Samus overperformed on him, she also legitimately overperformed against Lara the round before (once again for unexplained reasons), making Sams numbers against her easier to dismiss than they should have been. And hadnt Frog almost beaten Snake? Surely that implied something about Maguss strength as well. If all of this made Maguss fourpack hard to decode, things were obfuscated even more by Ceejs decision to make 04 an SFF-fest, reducing the accuracy of its results, and also banning Magus and Shadow from the Villain Contest, which might have exposed either of their real popularities much earlier. As I said earlier, all the signs were there, but it is truly impressive how much was there to mask the signs as well.

In any case, as Round 1 went on, people went back and forth litigating and re-litigating the arguments listed above, not in preparation for any kind of Round 1 match, but in excited anticipation for the Magus/Squall showdown of Round 2. Even Squall supporters werent expecting Magus to lose before getting there. His match with Knuckles was just supposed to be a testing ground to see if he would show any signs of weakness, to see if he would dip below the 60/40 result that most people were expecting. The match started, and from the very start, the Magus doubters were vindicated. Magus was winning, but he was winning by less than 60/40. *Much* less. Still, for the first hour or so, he was building up his lead steadily, even if he seemed to have stabilized around 54%. His match against Squall was in serious jeopardy, but thered be time for that later. And then, around 90 minutes in, as the Power Hour wore off, Maguss time started to run out. His percentage collapsed, and Knuckles was stalling him out consistently, keeping Maguss lead steady at a mere 600 votes. There was little doubt that Knuckles would win the Day Vote, and, with Maguss lead sitting where it was, that would almost certainly be enough to win the entire match as well. The board sat in shock, watching this all play out, as Knuckles did what the trends would predict, coming on strong during the day, and putting the match away for good. Magus would manage to pull off a near 1,000 vote comeback over the last several hours of the match, but it would not be enough. The character that most people had taken to win the entire Devil Division had just been eliminated in the First Round, before the showdown with Squall had even happened.

18. Starcraft vs. Super Smash Bros. Melee (Sp2004) R4

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/329c8a79.jpg

Starcraft 49.73% 48548
Super Smash Bros. Melee 50.27% 49082
TOTAL VOTES 97630
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(16)Starcraft_vs_(2)Super_Smash_Bros._Melee_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1660-division-final-starcraft-vs-super-smash-bros-melee

It is not uncommon for a latter round match to have an entrant that no one predicted. What is uncommon though is for both entrants to be unexpected, and thats exactly what we got in the Finals of the 128 Bit Division in 2004. Both entrants had made it here on the back of an underdog run, but one of those runs would be put to an end with this match, and the only thing left was to see which one it was. Melee had gone up against a trio of PS2 icons and beaten them all, most notably FFX, which had been the favorite both to advance in Melee's place, and to win the entire division. There were no sure bets in the 128 Bit Division that year, but if anyone had been willing to place money on anything, it would have been on FFX. As the one to take down FFX, Melee took on the mantle of the one to beat instead, however as previously mentioned, it was not the only game with a Cinderella run going into the match.

Enter Starcraft. Melee's run would be considered the most unpredictable of the contest in any other year, but in terms of upsets, in 2004 it was impossible to beat Starcraft. Its run is considered the most legendary in contest history for a reason, and this can be attested by the fact that three of its four matches that year made my Top 20. Starcraft had hit a perfect storm thus far in the contest, running up against the most anti-voted game on each of the three current systems, but that luck would finally run out with Melee, the only game in the division that could rival the fervor SCs fanbase felt for it. It was one thing to think that Halo or Wind Waker needed to be taken down a notch, but convincing people in 2004 that Melee had its loss coming would be a tougher sell. There was also the persistent question that had been dogging Starcraft all contest, the repeated refrain that questioned how much of Starcrafts success was really due to luck. Its victories tended to come on the heels of a last minute comeback, allegedly aided and abetted by a series of rallies from Battle.net. Aside from the usual drama that has always swirled around tipping point rallies, Starcraft was repeatedly attacked with the speculation that the rallies were just a smokescreen for the real cause of its comebacks: vote stuffing. The fact that these huge swings kept occurring right at the very end of each match was enough to rouse many users suspicions, and while no one could prove it, many people remained on high alert, just waiting for Starcraft to be exposed as the cheat they knew it was.

Melee might have been the slight favorite going into the match, but Starcraft came away from the Board Vote with the lead, narrowly holding onto it for the first several hours of the poll. It would never bring its lead much beyond 200 votes however, and once the Morning Vote kicked in, Melee made quick work of things, wiping out Starcraft's lead with ease and building up a lead of its own. Despite this being a Weekday Match, Melee seemed mostly unaffected by the usual schoolday trends, barely dipping during the Midday Vote, and increasing its margins consistently for 12 straight hours. For most matches, things would have been considered over by this point, but when it came to Starcraft we had learned to expect the unexpected. We were on the verge of the Second Night Vote, right when Starcraft had made its previous moves. Still, this time it was looking to be a bridge too far. Halo had been ahead by just over 1,000 votes at this time, Wind Waker by just over 2,000. Melee was ahead by 3,500. Could the Zerg Rush really overwhelm this kind of a lead? We all stood by, holding our breaths, waiting for another miracle to happen.

And then, shortly after 8:30 PM EST, something even more inexplicable than a miracle took place. Within a minute, Starcraft cut 100 votes from the lead. And then, almost just as quickly, Starcraft did it again. For nearly half an hour, a deluge of Starcraft votes poured into the site, its numbers spiking to astronomical levels as it cut 1,000 votes from the lead in only 20 minutes. We had seen rallies before, but this was factors beyond what we knew a rally to be capable of at this time. Hell, even a latter day megarally like Undertale's was unable to do more than match the pace set here. Matches played out live at this point, and we could watch in real time as hundreds of suspicious votes came in for Starcraft, one after another. There was only one explanation remaining, and that was vote stuffing. The stuffer quickly realized that they had been caught, and within 30 minutes the spike receded, but the damage had been done. The comeback would slow to a trickle but it would keep coming. In the most dramatic way possible, Starcraft's nightly comeback had begun.

The spike might have scared us, but Starcraft still had 2,500 votes to go at this point, and if it stuck to previous trends it would wind up just short. Still, trends or no, we had just witnessed the most blatantly obvious example of cheating in contest history, and Ceej was yet to respond. The night and the comeback wore on for several more hours before CJay finally spoke in a series of messages to the board. Yes, there was evidence of hundreds of stuffed votes for Starcraft during the suspicious time frame, and if necessary they would be removed from the final total. However, the scale of the stuffing was so massive that instead of having to sort through the results and remove every last illegitimate vote, Ceej would just wait and see if the stuffed votes would make a difference. If Melee won, the result would stand. If Starcraft won, it would see hundreds, if not 1,000+ votes removed. The match would continue on for several more hours after this, and Starcraft would finish with a spirited last minute comeback attempt like always, but the match was basically over the second Ceej made his post. Even if Starcraft won, it would most likely lose, and in the end it couldnt even do that, Melee pulling off a narrow victory, even with the stuffed votes remaining intact.

Smash Bros. has become such an institution on the site, and such a source of contest strength, that it can be hard to remember a time when its power took us all by surprise. Its not an obvious fit for such an RPG friendly site, and its prediction percentage coming out of this match certainly reflects that. However, against all odds, GameFAQS had declared it the best current-gen game, and its trajectory in the zeitgeist changed for good. Starcrafts reputation would also come away from this match permanently altered. While its contest achievements could not be denied, and its place in history strongly secured, the narrative of the naysayers who had doubted its legitimacy all along had temporarily taken precedence over the narrative of Starcraft as the plucky underdog. It had ended its first contest run mired in scandal, but oh what a run it had been.

19. Donkey Kong vs. Duck Hunt (Sp2004) R1

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/9/9a552f6b.jpg

Donkey Kong 50.07% 48587
Duck Hunt 49.93% 48444
TOTAL VOTES 97031
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(6)Donkey_Kong_vs_(11)Duck_Hunt_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1605-division-8-round-1-donkey-kong-vs-duck-hunt

I know the complaints coming about this match already. That there were no stakes. That the contestants were fodder. That this was just a pointless Round 1 match whose winner was always fated to get completely blown out the following round. All those reasons are *exactly* why it is so high on this list. The fact that such an objectively irrelevant match could produce the result it did is what makes this match so special. With the exception of Draven/Undertale matches, there is only one match in contest history to feature a 3,000 vote comeback. Its not a match featuring the Noble Nine or even a pair of Near Elites, its this one. Donkey Kong and Duck Hunt, two fodder games, who, in theory at least, share the same fanbase managed to produce a comeback which to this day has yet to be topped. Theres no greater contest narrative that this match ties into, no implications for anything else. Its just a pure diamond of a match, an objet dart.

While the hype didnt extend much past the match itself, there was still a decent amount of hype for this match going in. Classification-wise, it falls into a group I call Those Matches, 1 point, Round 1 matches that split the board almost evenly, and which actually do end up being relatively close in the end. Everyone knows that the winner will lose in the next round, but these matches inevitably take on outsized importance in board discussion, something about the raw simplicity of a 50/50 split with no past or future complications generating a higher than expected degree of tension. By the time you get to the big name clashes in later rounds, the data points are numerous enough to generate a narrative that can either be accepted or refuted in a couple of sentences, but theres something about the black box nature of a Round 1 tossup that causes people to generate reams of speculative analysis from the smallest of minutia. And there was certainly plenty of analysis spilled on this match. Duck Hunt was a game that everyone had played, but did anyone actually care about it? Donkey Kongs status in gaming history was legendary, but was it too old-fashioned for modern day voters to support? These questions divided the board, and going into the match it was considered anyones game.

The match started with a decently close result, the Board Vote not seeming to favor any one game, much as youd expect in a closely debated match such as this. As the First Night Vote started to kick in however, Donkey Kong began running away with things, and the dream of a nailbiter began to fade further and further away. While it would take 4 hours for Donkey Kongs lead to break 1,000, it would take only two more for it to break 2,000. Donkey Kongs overall percentage broke 56% around this time, and stayed at that number all throughout the morning, its lead frequently increasing by triple digits in the 15 minute updates that were customary at the time. Duck Hunt had looked like it could keep up early on, but those days were long gone at this point. Donkey Kong slowed down a little as the day went on, but even so, its lead would break 3,000 votes just past noon, and would keep rising afterwards. This was a number far removed from what we had seen in any previous comeback, and there was very little doubt in anyones mind that Donkey Kong would not keep continuing on the way it was.

At 1:45 PM EST, Donkey Kongs lead would reach its peak: 3,251 votes. With one exception, it had increased that lead with every single update for the past 11 hours straight. And even after that one cut an hour previously, Donkey Kong had bounced right back and kept increasing as steadily as before. At 2:00 PM however, Duck Hunt would make a 45 vote cut and the match would change instantly. Donkey Kong would manage to barely make a gain the following update, but from then onward, it would be 9 straight hours of Duck Hunt gains. If there is such a thing as a mathematically perfect comeback, this was it. Look at later matches like Halo/Starcraft or SoulCalibur/Kingdom Hearts. There is an hour or two of back and forth when vote shifts happen, or when comebacks begin. In Donkey Kong/Duck Hunt, there was none of that. It was as if a switch had been flipped at the halfway point of the match and all of a sudden the polarity was reversed. One update Donkey Kong was the one gaining and gaining, and by the very next update that role had shifted to Duck Hunt.

While one or even two cuts might be a fluke, it was immediately clear that this was nothing of the sort as the ASV (not that we called it that at the time) began in earnest and Duck Hunt started to tear into the lead in update after update. Initially taken by surprise, once we realized that we had a comeback on our hands, the board got straight to work doing what we do best, crunching numbers. While a 3,000 vote comeback is an extremely daunting figure, the poll trackers made their calculations and determined that if Duck Hunt kept up its comeback at its current pace, it would manage to regain the lead.right as the poll was ending. Time passed, the comeback continued, and Duck Hunts pace was recalculated. Now it was projected to take back the lead.right as the poll was ending. The only thing more perfect than the comebacks immediacy was its consistency. No matter how much the total incoming votes ebbed and flowed, Duck Hunts cuts would match the input perfectly. After every update was posted in the Poll Update Topic, there was a note saying how much of a gain Duck Hunt would need on the next update in order to stay on pace to win. Duck Hunt would hit that mark with a freakish exactitude almost every time. It was on pace to win, but it was going to be a photo finish. As afternoon turned into evening, incoming votes slowed, meaning that if Duck Hunt wanted to keep up its pace it would have to start gaining a larger and larger percentage of the incoming votes. Well, what did it do? It started to gain a larger and larger percentage of the incoming votes.

As the night wore on, the board crackled with an energy that was normally reserved for the battles of the Noble Nine. But the Noble Nine, for all their strength, had never done anything like this. Theyd never taken a 3,000 vote deficit, and on a dime, started to turn it around. They had never been propelled with this kind of unstoppable momentum for this long without missing a beat. The only entrant to ever show that kind of skill was, well, Duck Hunt. We werent entirely sure what was going on, but it was hard to not accept that Duck Hunt was on the verge of brute forcing its way to victory. And it almost did. Duck Hunt was able to near perfectly keep up its pace until the final minute, but near perfect was not quite good enough, not when youre behind by as much as Duck Hunt was. Donkey Kong would manage to win three updates in the final hours of the poll, which was not much, but just enough to barely hold on. When all was said and done, Duck Hunt had managed to come back by 3,108 votes in a match without major rallies, more than any entrant would ever do before or since. It had not won the match, but it had set a record that would never be broken.

20. Aya Brea vs. Donkey Kong (2002) R2

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/2/252bdf25.jpg

Aya Brea 48.94% 30478
Donkey Kong 51.06% 31798
TOTAL VOTES 62276
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(5)Aya_Brea_vs_(4)Donkey_Kong_2002
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/973-north-division-round-2-aya-brea-vs-donkey-kong

What is the appeal of the Contests? Is it just simply about predicting things, guessing whats popular, etc., and the matches themselves are secondary? Prior to the first Character Battle in 2002, contests were a regular feature on the site, but not the kind of capital-C Contests that we all know and love. Several times a year, every two or three months, Ceej would have a competition for the sites members, and these could be any number of things, ranging from having to predict a game/character based on a partial or manipulated screenshot, predicting the 10 most visited FAQS of the year, or even predicting the results of a demographic questionnaire posed to site members. Im no mind reader, but Im sure that as Ceej was putting together the first Character Battle, he considered it of a piece with these other competitions. A more expansive competition, sure, (he knew enough to create a board to discuss it right away), but something that was at least roughly in line with those other contests. Fun diversions to pass the time and see how much you knew about your fellow users. That was how it had been before, but the first Character Battle would change everything. We would have two other small competitions in that earlier vein later in the year, but aside from the 10th Anniversary Contest in 2005, it was Bracket Battles from here on out.

Once again, I dont know how much of what followed Ceej had foreseen, but it strikes me that the Contest being structured the way it was was no guarantee. There was no reason we *had* to see the polls play out live. We could just find out the result after the fact, or maybe every participant in the contest could fill out their votes along with their prediction, the same way that similar contests had worked. The contest was structured the way it was however, and while it was obvious from the very first match that there was something special with the Character Battle, it would take a while before a match came along that showed what more was possible from these things besides just predicting results. The First Round had its share of excitement, but the individual matches themselves werent anything that required a serious investment of time. You would look at the results, and as surprising as they might be, you would go Oh, thats an upset! or Oh, thats a big blowout! and then briefly discuss the implications of said result with other users for a while before going on with your day.The results themselves were the interesting part, not so much the journey to get there. Despite the desperate pleas for the kiddies to wake up, if there were any kind of drastic vote shifts that occurred in this first set of matches, they went largely unremarked on, and surprisingly, there was not a single match in Round 1 that featured a comeback, or was anything that might be considered a nailbiter. The closest match was Strider/Raziel, which, while a relatively narrow result, never became a 50/50 affair.

Round 2 started off with Mario/Morrigan which played out along these same lines, but then finally, with the second match of the round, we had something new on our hands. Donkey Kong was briefly ahead at the polls beginning, being a massive bracket favorite after all, but after the initial rush of votes, something shocking happened. Aya took the lead. Someone who many thought wouldnt make it out of the First Round was going toe to toe with a gaming icon. And as the Night Vote kicked in, Aya built that lead up, gaining around a 1,000 vote lead on DK by daybreak. We had seen some upsets in Round 1, but this one topped them all. But then, as the Day Vote began, something even more unprecedented happened: Donkey Kong started tocome back? Was such a thing possible? Just you wait til the kiddies wake up had become a joke by this point, and while it might not have been enough to redeem Spyros disaster in Round 1, the overall concept of Vote Trends was turning out to be quite real indeed. DK would tear into Ayas lead as the morning went on, eventually overtaking her and building up a lead of his own.

It was around this time that I, and I imagine a lot of other board regulars, logged on for the day and saw what was going on. Keep in mind that at this point in time, outside of a few obsessives, people werent maniacally tracking each poll from its very start. Not only because in a pre-smartphone, heavily pre-broadband era it wasnt customary to be online 24/7, but also because, prior to Aya/DK, there was no reason to be following along with a match in real time, let alone from the very beginning. Realizing that not only was there a 50/50 match going on but that the balance of power in it was shifting right in front of my eyes,I joined the rest of the site in a brand new practice: mass refreshing the poll as often as possible to see what the results were and where they were trending. Our eyes remained glued to the poll, and for the first time in contest history the way the poll played out generated more attention than the result itself.

Donkey Kong would eventually run away with the Day Vote, putting the match out of reach by the afternoon, but the drama wasnt over yet, as Aya would go on a 1,000 vote comeback of her own in the polls final hours*. Impressive, but ultimately not enough, and Donkey Kong would limp into the Sweet Sixteen. Aside from being one of the definitive Only on GameFAQS results (where else but on this site in 2002 is this a nailbiter), as well as establishing DKs bonafides as a choke artist, this match would be one of the most foundational ones in contest history. Every moment spent sitting in awe of the Day (or Night) Vote, every stomach turning bout of anxiety before refreshing a poll, every back of the envelope calculation to see if a comeback is still viable. They all come back to this match.

*I was able to find contemporaneous commentary from two weeks after this match in the one archived Stats Topic from 2002 where a user states that Donkey Kongs lead got up to 3,000. That would put Ayas comeback at around 1,700 which considering that the match only got 62,000 votes seems quite hard to believe, especially if it came right at the end, when votes should be slowing down. Looking into things, it appears as if Parasite Eve was never released in Europe, which actually would partly explain such an extreme vote shift, but I still find the scale of those numbers questionable.

"Just, one more thing... The people and the friends that we have lost, or the dreams that have faded...Never forget them."
--- Yuna, Final Fantasy X

Just reposting the last 4 matches for now.

Benh Zeitlin, although he's only made one feature since Beasts of the Southern Wild.