LogFAQs > #939635134

Headliner Analysis:

This honestly might be the only write-up where the Bust analysis is longer than the Headliner analysis. Yes, in case the header didnt make it clear, its another year where there was only one clear highlight, and I was stuck with a bunch of games that didnt really deserve the title. Like I did with Pokemon/Mario Galaxy and DOOM/Dark Souls III, I decided on both Sekiro and DMCV because their cases were both equally good, or to put it more honestly, bad.

Im sure there are some people who saw Sekiro in the Headliners section and were stunned, because it wasnt terribly unpopular to pick it over Monster Hunter. But lets keep this in perspective. Like I said in my 2018 write-up, Monster Hunter has a monster profile, and personally, I never thought it would drop that match.

Sekiros a game that only really looks good in retrospect, though. It started the contest getting a pedestrian 58% on Ni No Kuni, a game that I THOUGHT had faded from relevance. No one gave a shit about its sequel, and the original ended up being pretty controversial because of its shit battle system. Sekiro, meanwhile, was always going to be the squeaky wheel amongst the FROM games in bracket. Im going to copy and paste a post I made in Ultis thread about this, because its easier than writing new words:

Honestly, the reasons it didn't do anywhere near as well as the other FROM games are:

A) It's one of the newest games in bracket, and FROM's games often gain strength over time via bandwagoning and people evangelizing for them on every corner of the Internet. Look at where Dark Souls & Bloodborne were in 2015 vs where they are now.

B) That said, I don't think the Dark Souls fanbase has embraced Sekiro anywhere near as much as they did Bloodborne. The PvP and multiplayer component in those games matter A LOT to them. So do the games' longevity thanks to the different builds, fashion souls, and obscure lore. Sekiro just doesn't have any of that, and in the inverse of the rest of FROM's games, this might actually be the strongest it'll be.

So this initial match was the ho-hum result we expected, and with Monster Hunter putting an almost identical number against Bravely Default, it was pretty clear Sekiro was done for. The two games met in Round 2, with another ho-hum 55-45 style match. Not horrible for Sekiro, but not particularly amazing or striking. It was just another match in the bottom half of Division 1, featuring a bunch of games pretty close in strength to one another.

It wasnt until the DQXI and Zelda match that we realized that, yes, while these games were all decently close to one another, they were operating on a higher baseline than we thought. Case in point, Ni No Kuni is projected to be stronger than FFXV. Yes, really. While this hardly makes Sekiro some powerhouse, it did turn out to be pretty decent, and not THAT far behind Dark Souls III.

As for the other Headliner that barely deserves to be here, DMCV wasnt even expected to make it to Round 2. It had to deal with Donkey Kong, after all, a game whose leading man looked pretty good in 2018!

But heres the thing. If youve read this entire analysis, or at least the snubs lists, you should know that GameFAQs doesnt actually like NINTENDO that much. The characters, sure, but not the games. We like Mario, we like Zelda, we like Smash, and we like a couple of Metroid and Pokemon games. Thats it. Donkey Kongs strength as a character wasnt gonna translate to his game.

Meanwhile, DMC is a series that has been up and down on GFAQs. DMC1 and DMC3 were OK in 2010. Just OK. NONE of the games made any of the general games contests, implying they just dont get enough noms to show up when the barrier of entry gets hitched up. Dante himself is the only decently strong thing from the series.

So, here we had two entries whose main characters are significantly stronger than the games themselves. I can kinda see why people got tripped up on this match, but heres the thing: DMCV is available on PS4, Xbone, and PC. Tropical Freeze released on the Wii U, nuff said. Yes, its on Switch, but as a six year old port being sold for SIXTY dollars. Nintendo gets away with a LOT because everyone gets so limp-wristed when it comes to them, but SIXTY dollars was taking too much piss for a lot of people. You need some VERY significant additions for your half-a-decade old game to sell to anyone but ultra fans at SIXTY dollars; New Funky Mode aint gonna cut it. The final 57-43 match says it all: DMCs recent-ish hype was enough for it to put a decent number on a six year old platformer that has only ever had one solitary strong entry in its series, and even then it needs 90s hax to bolster it.

If it sounds like Im struggling to talk about DMC itself, its because I am. Heres why: Its hard for me to celebrate a good upset when in the following round, it couldnt even break 30 on Mario Odyssey. All this really tells me is that Tropical Freeze suuuuuuuuuucks, and while its good to get an unexpected easy win, it doesnt count for much when your opponent suuuuuuuuucks.

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