LogFAQs > #939193394

Headliner Analysis:

Actually, lets stop roasting this year so much and switch over to those very games. Somehow, they both ended up on opposite sides of the single most debated Division of the contest, Division 4. Usually in these analyses I focus on one game at a time, but Persona and Xenoblades stories are too intertwined for that, so Im going to switch to a Round by Round look.

They were both easy picks to make it out of Round 1, and they did indeed doink some fodder; Persona took out what I have to imagine was a Board 8 favorite in Ghost Trick, while Xenoblade walloped Nintendo stablemate Splatoon 2. So far, so good, right? Well, already there were complications. Xenoblade had what was essentially a bye into Round 3, as no one but Black Turtle thought Overwatch was worth shit, so it would be a while until it had to worry about anything. It was merely a matter of eyeing its performance against Fire Emblem Three Houses, which had just laid an egg in its match with South Park (Im saving my Fire Emblem roasts for later on). Personas performance, however, was almost identical to the performances of GTA and RDR, so it was impossible to tell if it was actually equipped to run the Rockstar gauntlet.

Lets not belabor Xenoblades side of things in Round 1; it ground its casualbait opponent into the dirt with a performance that looked great, and was when people were clued in that Xenoblade was doped up on something this contest, most certainly some Deluxe Edition hype and Xenoblade 2s success (in fact, Xenoblade 2s match against Batman was arguably when it really started to set in how well Xenoblade 1 might do).

But Persona 4s fourpack was hardly comparable, as Red Dead Redemption, hot off the release of RDR2, lie in wait. This match would matter a LOT, as the winner of it had a shot at taking out GTAV and winning the entire Division. And it sure played out like a match that mattered; Persona 4s amazing board vote and Rockstars shit one gave people some hope that this was gonna be an easy P4 W, but inevitably RDR sliced a 5% lead into almost nothing. And yet, it was probably the least exciting wire-to-wire match ever. No lead change, no REAL charge, nothing. RDR just kinda hung outside Personas door, like a creep in a Nickelodeon film who cant decide if hes actually gonna work up the courage to knock and confess his feelings to his stalking victim. Eventually, RDR realized Persona was just not that into it and fucked off, killing a shitton of casual (and expert!) brackets on its way out.

The assumption was that if P4 could barely handle RDR, then it would definitely fold to GTAV, which actually looks pretty decent in the 2015 x-stats. Just one tiny problem: GTA is a fucking choker. It always has been, always will be. This match played out hilariously similarly to the previous one; same hilariously skewed board vote, same slicing of the lead. I have to assume that Rockstar has a bush rented outside Personas home, where its games gaze wistfully at P4 through its windows and wonder whatd be like to be the sort of cult JRPG that GFAQs loves instead of a massive multibillion dollar empire. Yknow, before remembering that theyre a multibillion dollar empire and that GameFAQs having a hardon for JRPGs doesnt change that.

Okay that metaphor was getting jumbled by the end there. Point is, Persona 4 ran the Rockstar gauntlet and survived. At the same time it was barely breaking 51% on GTA, Xenoblade was roflstomping Three Houses in a match that absolutely cemented Fire Emblem as the Turd of the Contest. Xenoblade was supposed to be on the receiving end of a Nintendo hierarchy beatdown; instead, it was the one dishing out the beating. You wanna talk about hilarious board votes, this was 50-50 at the freeze, and had to have been one of the most bracket voted matches in the contest, because as soon as the first update hit Xenoblade jumped almost five whole percent. From there it didnt look back, landing a 60-40 win that baffled pretty much everyone. Im really feeling it, this is the Monados power, its Reyn time, etc etc lets get all the memes out now.

So the final for the inscrutable Division 4 was set. On one side, a bloodied and battered Persona 4 that had crawled out of its half of the Division with torn fingernails and a bruised face. On the other, Xenoblade descending from the heavens, looking absolutely princely after smiting its half. Hilariously, these games had a 14-16% prediction rate to make it this far; it had to have been the least likely of all the plausible combinations of games. When it came time to create Second Chance brackets, most people took Xenoblade without much thought, and at a decent percentage too.

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