LogFAQs > #915245247

Match 65: Dante vs. Lightning

Dante 18682
Lightning 9787

I said it in Round 1 and I'll say it again: Final Fantasy fans are a lot like Pokmon fans, always whining about how awful the most recent entry is and how much better things used to be. Older characters do better on this board in general anyway, but if you're from one of those franchises, the best thing that can happen is for a new game in your series to come out, because it establishes your age. 34.38% on Dante is surprisingly respectable given how awful opinions of FFXIII were, and I suspect the existence of FFXV is a large part of it.

Final Fantasy is a lot like these contests. The NES and SNES (well, Famicom and Super Famicom; the US equivalents didn't get all of them) managed three main series games each, and so did the PS1. Not counting the MMORPGs, we've had just four of them since. Meanwhile, we've all turned into crochety old men reminiscing about the good old days when we had contests every year and the upsets were genuinely surprising rather than the result of off-site rallies, except even then they were the result of off-site rallies. Look again at the previous write-up and the linked Frog-Axel match. Everyone suspected that Frog's comeback was less than legitimate, but it was a CT character beating a KH character so we all rejoiced rather than being upset.

Match 66: Chun-Li vs. Ganondorf

Chun-Li 11699
Ganondorf 16773

As usual, the board overreacted to this, suggesting that Dante could challenge Ganondorf. Probably because our inherent biases suggest that "Final Fantasy protagonist" should be a more impressive win than "fighting game character". Except Street Fighter (and I guess Mortal Kombat, though we've never tried anyone other than Scorpion and Sub-Zero from that franchise) have never been fodder like other fighting game franchises. You might even be able to add Soul Calibur to that list; Nightmare has managed to do okay in his appearances and Yoshimitsu (who is sort of a shared character between Tekken and Soul Calibur) got a win in 2013. And Lightning still suffers from being a post-merger Square Enix character.

Chun-Li put up another solid performance. She's never faced a Noble Niner, but all four of her losses are to solid midcarders from Noble Nine franchises--Zelda, Mario, and Final Fantasy.

Match 67: Vivi vs. Aya Brea

Vivi 21489
Aya 6993

This was a predictable blowout. Regardless of who won, it would set up a rematch of at least one previous Square vs. Nintendo match, and based on those past results, it was easy to joke that Square had fixed the match. Aya making this contest was honestly kind of surprising; she was a 26-seed in 2013 and hasn't had any releases since then to make her relevant. Of course, she's hardly the only bottom-third seed from that contest to make it to this one. The full list:

19-seeds:
Jill Valentine

20-seeds:
Aerith Gainsborough
Ridley

21-seeds:
Ryu Hayabusa
Simon Belmont
Chun-Li
Cecil Harvey

23-seeds:
Vincent Valentine

24-seeds:
Peach
Pac-Man
Claire Redfield

26-seeds:
Aya Brea
Bomberman

8 for 13 at making Round 2, with one of them making it all the way to Round 4. Though we were guaranteed at least one 21-seed from last contest would make Round 2 due to two of them facing each other in Round 1. My only explanation for this was that people saw the expanded field and figured that it would be easy to rally whatever ridiculous obscure character they loved into the field, so contest regulars got even fewer nominations than usual.

One of the other seeding gimmicks that year was that the 3-seeds would all be highly touted newcomers who would no doubt fail miserably. Only 4 of those 9 even made this contest and they all lost in Round 1.
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Also known as Cyberchao X.