LogFAQs > #948133232

Contest Quarterfinal: Link, Zack, Mario, and Mega Man X

Link - 54357 [40.28%]
Zack - 28099 [20.82%]
Mario - 29244 [21.67%]
Mega Man X - 23237 [17.22%]
Total Votes - 134937

Until my dying breath, I will always believe Zack could have caught an unstoppable bandwagon had he pulled this thing off. The next match would have been Link, Zack, Samus, and Crono. Link would have SFFd Samus into the ground, and who knows how the Zack/Crono thing would have gone with all the ZackFAQs and FF7 v Chrono Trigger fuel behind him? From there, it would have been Link, Zack, Snake, and Cloud. Zack probably finishes last place there thanks to Blonde Cloud > Black Cloud, but still! We've seen crazier results!

In all seriousness, as a lover of bandwagons and silly fun, this one hurt. He was <i>so</i> close, yet so far away. Let's start with Link's continued and insidious domination over this contest. 40% in a 4way poll in the quarterfinals against this competition is ludicrous. Just ludicrous. This was some '85 Bears playoff run type shit.

Past that is where the fun was. One of these three Nintendo titans was bound to get dicked over, and it was apparent very quickly that Mega Man X was not going to be able to hack it. He was somewhat close to Mario for a little while -- and I will always maintain Mario has more overlap with Link than the Mega Man series -- but he fell off to a distant SFF-fueled third place. This left a clear Link > Mario > MMX order for Zack to try and squeeze into, but he just started so damn slow in this poll.

When this thing started, Zack was actually in dead last. This spelled his doom right from the jump, because it showed his support was more organic than joke type. He had a bandwagon, but not the kind of bandwagon he would need to work miracles. He was also sitting there behind two characters that were being SFFd into the <i>ground</i> by Link. Still, he gave us an incredible effort and went out almost exactly like he does at the end of Crisis Core.

First, he had to come back on Mega Man X, which took quite awhile. He was dead last early, but the gap with X was only 60 votes. It took almost an hour just to erase that lead, and when he did he was unable to make any headway at all. He and X stayed tied for another couple hours, before the typical Europe vote did X in and Zack started going to work. We should pause here and give X some credit for getting this far, and note that him being SFFd twice is not indicative of what his actual strength is. To this day, he is solidly either upper midcard or near-elite. I doubt that ever changes, because the guy is just too damn cool. The entire reason we all fell in love with him in the 90s was because he could do <i>so</i> many more things that vanilla Mega Man just couldn't do. HADOUKEN!

The funniest thing happened when Zack came back and finally caught up to X for good -- he was less than 300 votes away from Mario himself. Hey if he could come back once, why not aim for the king? It seemed unthinkable, but why the hell not go for it and give ZACKFAQs the match they all wanted?

And give us the match we wanted he did. It took all night of chipping away and chipping away some more, but Zack managed to claw his way up to Mario. Mario! FREAKING MARIO! It was insane! 100% of gurus picked Link to get first (obviously), but over 75% picked Mario to get second. 40 people picked Mega Man X. TWO picked Zack. Two! More people picked Liquid Freaking Snake to pull this magic than Zack.

Yet there he was, tied with Mario, with the morning vote yet to come. We all figured the match was over right about here, but then the absolute unthinkable happened. Zack started winning the morning vote and building a lead! It's hard to put this in perspective for those who weren't there, but a lot of you might remember Undertale since it was pretty recent. You know how happy Undertale fans were at the entire tidal wave in that contest? Remember how there was a counter bandwagon? Had Zack pulled this off, it would been all the love and none of the counter bandwagon. That's how hard we were pulling for him to miracle his way into second place here.

We all know the rest of the story. Zack only built up a 150 vote lead before getting stalled with the morning vote, and though it took Mario the <i>entire morning,</i> he did ultimately take control of the poll and slowly (very slowly) build a lead for himself. It was so slow in fact that Mario only led by 350 going into the ASV, which let people hold out hope that Zack might still pull it off. When Zack started cutting some votes during the beginnings of the ASV, people lost it all over again.

Unfortunately, around 4pm Mario finally stopped dicking around and ended the match. He did it by bludgeoning poor Mega Man X to death and stealing a bunch of support from him, but a win is a win and you do what you have to do to survive and advance. Mario turned a pretty close match into an 1100 vote win, but Zack did have one final bit of fight left in him to prevent the final margin from being bigger. Oddly enough, this match played out almost exactly like Crisis Core, right down to the ending and Zack refusing to quit. It was like Rocky Balboa meets his contest end or something, and it was remarkable to watch. Mario may have won here, but he didn't win our hearts.

Zack, bottom's up to you bro. You're the Star of the Contest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9Fzwuf43c

For those hoping Mario would get his comeuppance for this, an old enemy of his was waiting in the wings, and this time he had friends.

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