LogFAQs > #939143131

Headliner Analysis:

But TO HELL with all that. Enough half-hearted attempts at making games sound like they did poorly when they didnt. I dont blame anyone who scrolled straight to this section, because as the banner of this year signals, 2011 did fckin amazing. Theres a LOT of good to talk about here.

Of the headliners, theres a noticeable gap between Portal and the other two, so lets start there. Portal 2 had a lot to prove, as it was placed in one of the most debatable eightpacks of the contest, featuring a Rockstar game, a Kingdom Hearts game, and an Animal Crossing game. You could make a case for any one of them making it to Division Finals, and while Portal 2 was the slight Board favorite to make it there, it had to contend with doubts stemming from its baffling 2015 x-stat. It placed well below the halfway line, at 78th place. For such a beloved game, it seems strange, but it makes sense when you consider that it was hidden behind that absurd Sonic-Pokemon match. While most of us knew that, the game still had to prove it was worth the benefit of the doubt.

And prove it Portal did. It started off with a nice 65-35 on an underseeded Tomb Raider, but it was still unclear if that was good enough when RDR2 and Animal Crossing were also taking care of business. The following round provided some great vindication for those who feel that Square has lost a step or ten, when Portal broke 62% on what had formerly been a pretty damn strong series, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kingdom Hearts was never going to be what it once was. But it was STILL unclear if Portal was doing well enough, as RDR2 had put down a strong performance on what could very well have been a dangerous entrant in Animal Crossing New Leaf.

So much like the Pokemon v Nier battle, we were flying into this one blind. And also much like that match, it started and ended without much fuss, with Portal putting up a very comfortable 53% on the first Rockstar game in half a decade, a game with INSANE hype around it. There was no doubt now that those who had put their faith in Portal had been richly rewarded, as casual brackets went down in flames around them. It went on to suffer a 57-43 loss to Persona 5; an anticlimactic end to its run, but seeing as Persona would go on to prove itself to be a contender for top 5 of the entire contest, this was hardly a humiliating loss.

Lets graduate from the game that made Division Finals to the game that made Quarterfinals, then. Motherflippin Dark Souls entered this contest with a 1 seed and a lot of pomp and circumstance; between the 2015 and 2020 contests, Dark Souls prestige has continued to go up and up. It has one of the loudest, if not THE loudest, fanbases in modern gaming, one that has evangelized for it on every corner of the Internet. It literally became the shorthand for hard game; everyone reading this is surely aware of how utterly abused the term the Dark Souls of X has become. Developers are increasingly leaning on its style of combat; it used to be that everyone ripped off the Arkham games, but now everyone wants a piece of Miyazakis pie. There are the blatant Souls clones like the Surge or Code Vein or a billion other examples, but even a series as huge as God of War has looked to Dark Souls for guidance.

Unfortunately, much like Portal, Dark Souls had a very strange 2015 performance. In one of the most inexplicable matches of that years contest, it completely and utterly folded to A Link to the Past, looking quite poor after scoring a big win on MGSV. This caused quite a few people to underrate the Miyazaki games in the 2020 bracket, and despite essentially becoming canonized and receiving a MUCH needed HD remaster between 2015 and now, Dark Souls was only the slightest of favorites over The Last of Us.

It would have to wait until Round 3 to prove itself, too, as it was dumped in one of the worst fourpacks in the contest. It cruised to easy victories against Hotline Miami and Rocket League before getting a rematch against MGSV where it proceeded to outdo its 2015 result by 8 percent. At the time, some questioned how legit this result was, as MGSV may very well have dropped in the intervening time, but Dark Souls would prove that boost was very real. I dont really wanna touch on the Division Final here, because who knows how badly the Last of Us was or wasnt hurt by the leaks coming out at a very unfortunate time for it.

BUT before I get to the Quarterfinals lets turn to the last headliner, because as luck would have it, Dark Souls was on a collision course with its fellow 2011-mate, Skyrim. Funnily enough, the Elder Scrolls and its parent company Bethesda have had the complete opposite trajectory that Dark Souls and FROM have had. Skyrim looked absolutely beastly in 2015, and was the single strongest game of the decade at the time. B8ers spent half a decade speculating on how dominant a run Skyrim would have in the inevitable GotD2 contest but all the while, the Internet was starting to shift against Bethesda. Fallout 4 being what it was started a downward spiral for the company, as people began to grow more and more frustrated with their engine and how their games were being dumbed down further and further. Witcher 3 starting to explode in popularity did not help, as the richness of that games writing and world was used as a direct juxtaposition to Bethesdas content. Fallout 76 was the deathblow, though, the last straw that made people throw their hands up and say in unison, FUCK BETHESDA.

Still, at this point Skyrim is old enough to be spared most of the backlash right? Well, not quite. It was the overwhelming favorite to make it out of Division 8, beat whatever made it out of Division 7, and had plurality backing to make it to the Finals. After a beatdown of a game no one on this site cares about, alarm bells were being sounded as early as Round 2, when it noticeably underperformed against Journey. Some tried shrugging it off as an effect of Journey being given away for free around the time of that match, but that 4-5 point underperformance turned out to be pretty consistent. Then we had the hilarious Mario Kart 8 match; Witcher had set the bar with a 60-40 on Mario Galaxy 2 a few days beforehand, so the pressure to perform was on Skyrim. It needed a bigger win than that on a weaker Mario game to have a shot at finals, and so it strut on stage and gave us an identical 60-40 performance.

Now, MK8 would prove to be pretty damn legit, but as much as some people tried to justify their continued faith in finalist Skyrim, this was the Round where it was made clear that Witcher was gonna blowtorch it in the semis. In fact, this was around the point where there were rumblings that it wasnt even going to make SEMIS, as Dark Souls was tearing it up in the adjacent Division. Actually, scratch that; there were rumblings that Skyrim wasnt even going to make it out of the Division! That strain of chatter was silenced pretty quickly when Skyrim put up ANOTHER 60-40 on HGSS, the match that revived a lot of peoples hope in the game (although if you had asked me at the time, this was much more an indictment on Pokemon and Nier than it was some massive flex, and I would be proven mostly right).

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