Board 8 > The 128 Greatest GameFAQS Contest Matches of All Time - The Top 64

(+) Yeah! (+)

"Everything was a long time ago."
--- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Thank you once again for all the kind words and encouragement from the previous topic! Hopefully, we'll be able to keep the discussion going as the countdown goes on. First up, I'll recap the previous entries on the list, then move on to #64.

64. Link vs. Cloud Strife (2004) R6

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/4/4f248ac4.jpg

Link 51.82% 64443
Cloud Strife 48.18% 59910
TOTAL VOTES 124353
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Link_vs_(1)Cloud_Strife_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1780-tournament-final-link-vs-cloud-strife

No its not *the* Link Vs. Cloud, but in its own way this match would also be one of the most important ones weve ever had. The term LAW (Link Always Wins) might not have been coined until ~2010, but the concept itself had certainly been around without a snappy name for years prior. Link was the unquestioned favorite to win each years respective Character Battle, and while each additional type of contest (Series, Games, Rivalries) would see people rush to pick a non-Zelda winner, thinking that *this* format would be the one to finally break the streak, the LAW would always reassert itself and a Zelda related entry would storm its way to victory yet again. But in summer of 2004, there was nothing guaranteed about a victory for the Zelda series, or even for Link himself. In fact, when it came to contest victories, for the only time in history, Zelda was outnumbered 2-1, with Links win in 2002 remaining the sole non Final Fantasy victory in a GameFAQS contest. FFVII was on a roll, and the general consensus was that Cloud would win yet again, and continue the streak. The school of thought was that the facts on the ground had not changed, and so if Cloud had won the year before, he should be able to win again this year.

That consensus was, as I said, general, but it was not universal. Link had a sizable contingent of support as well, possibly even more than Cloud overall, and that support was not unreasonable. Aside from the typical year over year variation which could give him a win, Link had just appeared in a highly publicized, and very well received teaser for Twilight Princess earlier this year, potentially wiping the stink of Celda off his future performance. But this match occurred during a very regimented era of contest prognostication, when we cast aspersions on most things besides a characters X-Stat Value or a new game, and so many people dismissed the E3 hype as irrelevant.

We would see from the very first match of the contest how questionable that dismissal was as Link got the first in a series of non-Celda pictures and went on to defeat CATS by an even larger margin than his rival Cloud had done in Round 1 the year before. This was the very first match that the public could use the X-Stats to predict, and to the X-Stats credit it would end up predicting the final Link Vs. Cloud result almost perfectly. The match with CATS would start yet another trend in X-Stats analysis though, which was dismissing a result produced via them that you dont like. Even though Links performance predicted he would beat Cloud in the finals, this was quickly dismissed as year over year variance, a reasonable argument, but as the contest went on the warning signs would keep building up. Link would pull off a series of blowouts, always doing better than predicted, and while Clouds victories were solid, he was never quite able to match Link. He did manage to pull off an impressive victory over Sephiroth in the Quarterfinals, in a match that had produced some degree of debate pre-contest. There was a theory that Clouds victory the year prior had been driven partly by a voting base that didnt want to see the same character win every year, and that, as the next in line popularity wise, Sephiroth would be the beneficiary of that in 2004. Obviously, that theory didn't pan out.

But any benefit that Cloud would get from safely putting away Sephiroth would be dwarfed by his and Links respective Semifinals, which saw Cloud defeat Samus by a safe but not overwhelming margin, while at the same time Link would more than double Mega Man. The discrepancy in victory over two characters that were seen as roughly comparable was too much to dismiss, and Link would enter the Finals as a sizable favorite. Cloud would not go down without a fight, though. After a predictably poor opening, Cloud would come back strong with the First Night Vote, managing to bring the match down to a 50/50 result as the morning dawned. Cloud was, despite the new odds, doing better than expected, and actually giving us a good match with Link for the first five or so hours of the poll. Nintendos strength with the Day Vote would prove too much though, and Link would use it to put the match safely away. Despite Cloud doing a bit better over the matchs back half, it wasnt enough. It wouldnt be by a lot, but Link would end up winning the match, and taking back his crown. And, with the exception of rallies, he would never give it up again. The battle was in some ways over for good after this match, the ultimate winner had been decided, and that winner (as always) was Link.

This was also the first match to feature multiple user match pics.

Not the first match to use multiple pics overall though, as CJayC had two match pics each for the semifinal matches right before.

But yeah, I always wanted to believe that Cloud would beat Link next time, but it was never meant to be.

63. Sarah Kerrigan vs. Vincent Valentine (2005) R1

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a8bc1fe6.jpg

Sarah Kerrigan 21% 21083
Vincent Valentine 79% 79313
TOTAL VOTES 100396
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(4)Sarah_Kerrigan_vs_(5)Vincent_Valentine_2005
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2087-devil-division-round-1-sarah-kerrigan-vs-vincent-valentine

The 2005 bracket was in many ways a gift to the board. The company cap of 2004 was lifted, and the bracket would be flooded with a ton of Contenders who we hadnt seen before, but which had been talked up for years as potentially interesting contest entrants. These newcomers popped up all throughout the bracket, generating a lot of debate, but the Round 1 match that generated some of the most debate, was this one, the only match in the contest to feature two newcomers. Many of the newcomers would fizzle out in Round 1, but in this match that wouldnt be possible, at least not entirely. One of these two would have to advance to the next round, and which one it would be was a hotly debated topic.

There were reasons to both believe in and doubt both characters. Vincent was a cool badass from FFVII, the game that was essentially GameFAQSs whole reason for being, but on the other hand he was a secret character. On the other other hand, this was Game*FAQS* after all, and if FFVII walkthroughs were what gave the site its popularity, one could, and many did, argue that unlocking Vincent was the entire reason behind the site in the first place. And then there was Kerrigan. As the most popular villain from Starcraft, she had the pedigree of being from the game that had shocked everyone and made the Elite Eight in the previous years game contest, while on the other hand PC characters, even ones from popular games had not had the best track record on the site. On the other other hand, in two of the last three contests, a Blizzard entrant had been counted out, and shocked everyone by going on a Cinderella run. Would Kerrigan be the next? All of these arguments were tossed back and forth throughout the month of July, but in the end the consensus seemed to settle on Vincent as the one to win the match. Still, Kerrigans wild card factor could not be counted out, and she had a vocal minority of supporters in her favor as well, and even those that did have Vincent winning, mostly had him doing somewhere in the low to mid 60s. A safe victory, but not a blowout.

When the match came around, it would end up being one of the few matches that live up to their hype, but also one of the even fewer matches that live up to their hype for the exact opposite reason. Vincent would win, as most people predicted, but the margin of his victory was absolutely staggering. Not only had he beaten Kerrigan, he had managed to snag nearly *80%* of the vote while doing so. There had a been a wide, wiiiide range of opinions on Vincents popularity going into the 2005 contest, spanning all the way from a midcarder to the level of the Near Elites, but this performance, initially at least, seemed to go beyond even the most optimistic of those speculations. There had been doubts going into the contest as to whether Vincent had what it would take to beat Squall and/or Magus and win the Devil Division, but this performance wasnt at Squall or Magus level. It was approaching Cloud/Sephiroth level. Could Vincent really be that popular? Opinions came down to Earth as the contest went on and it became clear that Kerrigan had just been fodder, but on the day of the match, all bets were off, and Vincent had just pulled off probably the most impressive contest debut of all time.

I would also be remiss to not point out the other reason this match is on the list. It has to have been if the not the worst, one of the top three all-time worst board reactions to a match. Ive always thought that a sore winner is worse than a sore loser, and theres no better evidence than this. If it wasnt bad enough for Kerrigan pickers that their choice was barely breaking 20% of the vote, a squad of Vincent supporters would spend the rest of the day rubbing it in, in the smuggest, most obnoxious way possible, not missing any opportunity to gloat and point out how stupid the other side had been. If it wasnt for everyone getting a reality check the following day, who knows how long it would have gone on for, but for 24 hours at least, Board 8 was not a place you wanted to be.

Yeah, Vincent/Kerrigan was a shocking result. Literally nobody expected anything close to that.

And yeah, there was definitely a contingent of arrogant Vincent supporters, which continued beyond just this match. Anyone who thought Dante would come anywhere close to Vincent after this was mocked and dismissed...right up until Dante got 46% on him.

We do think of these years as the glory days of the contests, and that passion was usually a good thing. However, you did get moments like this, too.

Was Vincent/Kerrigan the biggest blowout comparatively to the hype surrounding the match? I can't think of another heavily-debated match that turned out to be so lopsided.

Yeah, I don't know of any other match where there was serious debate that ended in a quadrupling.

I'm sure there were debates over matches that turned out to be blowouts in 2002, but I doubt there were too many Ms. Pac-Man or Serious Sam believers against Mega Man.

Leonhart4 posted...

I'm sure there were debates over matches that turned out to be blowouts in 2002

I'd love to go back in time and see what the speculation for Ryo Hazuki vs Guybrush looked like.

It's not quite the same thing, but I'm pretty sure the last perfect bracket in 2002 fell to Ryu vs. CATS. No data whatsoever sure led to just about anything being on the table as a remote possibility.

There was quite a bit of debate over Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance vs. WWF No Mercy in 2010 which ended up 72/28.

Kotetsu534 posted...

There was quite a bit of debate over Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance vs. WWF No Mercy in 2010 which ended up 72/28.

this is true, I was one of the people who had No Mercy!

I was one of the people who got fooled by the people who had No Mercy

Underleveled posted...

Was Vincent/Kerrigan the biggest blowout comparatively to the hype surrounding the match? I can't think of another heavily-debated match that turned out to be so lopsided.

Overall, it certainly has to be. Although I personally had Serious Sam > Mega Man back in '02. <_<

Oh yay next part is up

62. Link vs. Ganondorf (2004) R2

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/63ac757a.jpg

Link 87.9% 77295
Ganondorf 12.1% 10640
TOTAL VOTES 87935
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(1)Link_vs_(8)Ganondorf_2004
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1750-hyrule-division-round-2-link-vs-ganondorf

Ill start this writeup with a quote I remember from the days leading up to this match. Ive forgotten the user, but the understatement of the contest has been stuck in my head for 20 years:

I dont know. On one hand, Ganondorfs pretty cool, but on the other hand, whos gonna vote for Ganondorf over *Link*?

Any contest analysis nowadays will be littered with a list of abbreviations and jargon that is almost indecipherable to any outsider. LFF, TJF, and of course, SFF or Same Fanbase Factor, the grandaddy of all outside factors that can affect the results of a match. What has kind of been lost to history over the years however, is just how contested the concept originally was. It might seem obvious or commonplace nowadays, when even the best designed brackets have two or three obvious SFF fests, but there was legitimate debate at one point about, if not the existence, the extent to which SFF could really affect a match. There was a school of thought, supercharged by the appearance of the X-Stats after Summer 2003, that each characters popularity was a concrete thing. A mathematical value. Just plug these values into a formula, and you could get the result of a match. These values would waver somewhat from year to year, and obviously if a character had a new game, but, in theory, if you knew the values of two characters you could figure out the result of a match between them. If a character was supposed to get 33% on Link, they would get 33% on Link. There wasnt anything else that had to be taken into account, either regarding the match itself, or the relation between the two characters.

Enter Same Fanbase Factor, a fairly simple complication to this idea. If two characters had the same fanbase, their popularities would overlap, and the more popular character would overperform, sometimes dramatically. It might surprise people who arrived to the scene post-2004, but this was not readily accepted. Voters arent as fickle as that, the reasoning went. If a character had a certain strength, that was their strength, end of story. Maybe SFF could alter results by a couple percentage points, but thats it. And honestly, prior to 2004 there werent a lot of counterexamples to push back against this idea. Mario/DK in 2002 was the big one, but that was generally dismissed as a fluke due to their two histories being so intertwined with the legacy of gaming. Crono/Kefka was another match that got pointed to, but to the SFF doubters that wasnt even worthy of debate. Theyre not even from the same game!

And then 2004 arrived. First there was the Spring Contest, which saw a series of seemingly undeniable SFF beatdowns (LttP/SM, SM64/OoT). This did soften opinion towards SFF a great deal, but there were still some people that either ignored those results, or tried arguing that SFF only existed for games, and not for characters. The argument over SFF would come to a head with a seemingly contest size experiment several months later. Starting in Round 2, there would be SFF setup after SFF setup. The extent to which SFF existed would certainly be known by the time the contest was over. However, as it turned out, it didnt take that long. It only took the first match of Round 2. Link was expected to overperform on Ganondorf by around 5-7%, but in the end he would exceed even the wildest expectations of the SFF evangelists. Not only would he overperform on Ganondorf, he would do so by over 20%, taking Ganondorf below even the numbers that had been put up by CATS. Not only was this the second match in a row where Link had proved he had come to take back his crown, this is the match that would prove the existence of SFF beyond any reasonable doubt, and showed just how elastic the popularities of contest entrants could be.

It's funny to realize that SFF, something we take for granted these days, was something we had to gradually come to understand back then. Other websites that run popularity contests definitely don't understand the concept!

And yet, it is kind of funny to think that 2004 would also produce some SFF results where it didn't look like it was even a concept. Mega Man vs. Zero being the big one, and in retrospect, Crono vs. Magus wasn't really the SFF fest we initially thought it was.

But Link vs. Ganon and even Link vs. Yoshi later on, made it so undeniable anyway since we knew those two weren't slumming it with CATS any other way.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Im shocked people denied SFF after 2002. Mario/Donkey Kong made it super obvious to me. What I didnt get for awhile though is just how many fanbases overlap.

There was no reason to believe DK was strong when he could barely beat Aya Brea.

Leonhart4 posted...

There was no reason to believe DK was strong when he could barely beat Aya Brea.

Yeah but when youre a literal gaming icon and you get outdone by Servbot against a common opponent that raises some red flags.

The Servbot match itself was the red flag in the end

I knew about SFF from American Idol. The week Jennifer Hudson got voted out. The bottom 3 were very similar vocalists. The other girl in the bottom 2 (Fantasia) won.

I was originally mad that Fantasia won because she had bottom 2's, but then I realized it was the same thing as the SFF that the board was talking about with the contests. And because of that I somehow did really well in the Oracle challenge that year.

These days I can never even pick the winner right, which just shows how little I know about modern gaming. This is a great blast from the past. Wish I still had that fanfic I wrote about how we were all here in 2024 with the "64 winners of past contests" (yes, L block was one. )

Out of curiosity, is the top 64 going to mostly be from the 2002-2006 contests?

OrangeCrush980 posted...

Out of curiosity, is the top 64 going to mostly be from the 2002-2006 contests?

A large majority will be from that period, but there should be plenty from later years as well, although the very top will definitely be mostly 2002-2006.

61. Final Fantasy VII vs. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past vs. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time vs. Final Fantasy X (2009) R6

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e592f628.jpg

Final Fantasy VII 36.75% 52954
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past 11.84% 17067
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 40.39% 58200
Final Fantasy X 11.02% 15876
TOTAL VOTES 144097
https://shorturl.at/c6ipZ
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3508-contest-final-ffvii-zelda-lttp-zelda-oot-ffx

Final Fantasy VII vs. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (2009) BM

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/4/4c291e4a.jpg

Final Fantasy VII 47.31% 73726
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 52.69% 82112
TOTAL VOTES 155838
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_vs_The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Ocarina_of_Time_2009
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3509-contest-bonus-final-fantasy-vii-vs-zelda-ocarina-of-time

2009 was a contest that was mostly spent biding time for the Finals. There are few times in contest history when two entrants stood so far above the rest of the pack, but that was the case when it came to our second Games Contest. If anybody had expected the popularities of OoT or FFVII to start lagging in the five years since the previous one, they would have to keep waiting, because these two games still stood as absolute pillars of strength on the site. Everyone knew that the Finals would consist of those two games, and the real debate instead surrounded which would be the two other finalists that they would drag along with them, and how exactly those two remaining games would influence the final result. There had been a rule of thumb ever since Link regained his title that while Link might be the Number 1 character on the site, FFVII was still the Number 1 game, and this prediction was reflected in the brackets. OoT had a healthy amount of support in its corner, but the board more or less sided with FFVII. This would be FFVIIs last real shot to win a contest, and we all waited to see if it could pull it off.

Usually in situations such as this, where there are one or two favorites and the whole contest becomes a tea leaf reading affair, there is some sign of weakness. Someone allows a fodder entrant to get an embarrassingly large amount of votes, or the favorite cuts things way too close against an entrant not otherwise considered to be in their tier. There was none of that in this contest. FFVII and OoT either met their benchmarks or exceeded them every round. And not just against fodder. As the competition got stiffer, the two titans seemed to get almost more impressive in their victories, breaking 40% every round, even against some of the most elite games on the site, routinely exceeding their Oracle predictions by 5% or more. When faced with a vote split or LFF situation, instead of crumbling, FFVII and OoT simply destroyed their compatriots instead, hoovering up any of the overlapping votes to make sure no other game came close. By the time the Finals rolled around it was clear that there would be no third party surprises. These two were in it to win it, and while FFVII retained an edge in predictions, OoT had gained a lot of ground in peoples estimation, and the final result was considered anyones game.

In the end, OoT would prove that the LAW didnt just apply to characters, finishing in first place, and cementing LoZs place at the top of the GameFAQS hierarchy. The match was reasonably close, especially as LttP and FFX got destroyed by their big brothers and didnt have much leeching to do, and it played out very similarly to the Link vs. Cloud matches we had seen over the years. OoT started off with a bang, FFVII came on strong during the night, but it wasnt enough and OoT used the Day Vote to put the match to rest for good. However, that wouldnt be the end of things. For the first time in a 4-way contest, Bacon announced that the Bonus Match this year would be a 1v1 showdown between FFVII and OoT, giving FFVII one more shot at redemption. There was a school of thought that in the four way final with two Zeldas and two Final Fantasies, OoT had overperformed as Zelda fans were more likely to fall in line and help their game win, and that 1 v 1 FFVII could potentially turn the tables. A Mini-Debate ensued as to whether or not FFVII should be considered the winner of the contest if it won the Bonus Match, and while some people tried making stink about OoTs title potentially being taken away, they were eventually mollified when we all agreed that no, the winner of the Bonus Match would not be considered the winner of the contest.

OoT would surprise yet again however by winning the Bonus Match by more or less the same amount it had won the regular Finals, and while the match might have lacked much drama, that certainly didnt deter voters, as it finished with 155,000 votes, ten thousand more than the regular Finals match. It might have just been a Bonus Poll, but this OoT/FFVII match represented the end of an era, in a way as the amount of raw strength and popularity on display here would never be seen again. Sure the 2010 Finals would still break 100,000 votes with ease, but by then the cracks in the sites popularity were beginning to show. 2009 would be the last year at GameFAQSs peak and this match would be the perfect capstone to that era of the site.

Yeah, I was reviewing the 2009 contest earlier this year, and I had kinda forgotten just how dominant both FFVII and OoT looked the whole way through. "End of an era" sounds about right in more ways than one.

Man I wish I was around during those times. I knew of the contests and voted now and then, but it wasn't until the end of the 2010 contest that I discovered the actual board.

The only good contest I got was GotD

_SecretSquirrel posted...

And yet, it is kind of funny to think that 2004 would also produce some SFF results where it didn't look like it was even a concept. Mega Man vs. Zero being the big one, and in retrospect, Crono vs. Magus wasn't really the SFF fest we initially thought it was.

But Link vs. Ganon and even Link vs. Yoshi later on, made it so undeniable anyway since we knew those two weren't slumming it with CATS any other way.

Mega Man vs. Zero has always been a weird one. In both 2004 in a 1v1 and in 2008 in a 4way, it looked like *Zero* was the overperforming because of SFF even though Mega's higher base strength meant he won anyway (although "won" isn't exactly the right word for 2008 because Zero's presence actually led to Mega being knocked out by the *Weighted Companion Cube*). But then in 2013 in 3-ways, it just kind of...acted normally. Zero got the doors blown off by a sufficient margin that Charizard was unable to pull the upset over Mega Man. That was the match that killed my Guru entry, though it was pretty much dead anyway because I was counting on Samus dragging Mario down enough for Charizard to squeeze past when thanks to Mario getting knocked out two rounds earlier, *Pokemon Trainer Red* was there instead making Samus's victory a foregone conclusion regardless of who won the Mega Man-Charizard duel.

Alanna82 posted...

I knew about SFF from American Idol. The week Jennifer Hudson got voted out. The bottom 3 were very similar vocalists. The other girl in the bottom 2 (Fantasia) won.

I was originally mad that Fantasia won because she had bottom 2's, but then I realized it was the same thing as the SFF that the board was talking about with the contests. And because of that I somehow did really well in the Oracle challenge that year.

These days I can never even pick the winner right, which just shows how little I know about modern gaming. This is a great blast from the past. Wish I still had that fanfic I wrote about how we were all here in 2024 with the "64 winners of past contests" (yes, L block was one. )

A fellow Idol fan! Another voting contest with its fair share of fan jargon, most of which is completely outdated in the ABC era because of how the voting process changed. For example, there's what was called the "Sesame Street Effect" due to a metaphor, which basically states that if exactly two contestants have bad performances, the *third-worst* contestant is actually the most likely to go home, because fans of the two contestants who blew it are galvanized to try to get their contestant past the other one. This was most notable in Season 6 when the same two contestants caused this for a number of weeks. However, there's a weird corollary to the SSE: it doesn't only trigger when two contestants have trainwrecks. It triggers any time the decision is perceived as being which of two contestants "should go home". Which has on multiple occasions resulted in the clear best contestant going home in third place--first in Season 6, where Melinda Doolittle was the frontrunner all season long but left in third place because, apparently, too many fans took it for granted that she'd be in the finale and decided to weigh in on whether Jordin or Blake deserved to be her opponent, and again in Season 10, which has added weight because it was SFF that led to the idea that one contestant was a "foregone conclusion". In that season, the Final Three consisted of Scotty McCreery, Lauren Alaina, and Haley Reinhart. And with both Scotty and Lauren being country singers, Haley's presence in the finale seemed like a foregone conclusion the moment that James Durbin was announced to have been eliminated in 4th place--something I warned against. "Don't get complacent now. We've been voting our asses off all season to keep our girl alive." Yes, I was a Haley fan from the start, and she really did barely scrape through for much of the competition, doing just enough to avoid elimination, but she finished strong. And in the Final 3 show, she absolutely schooled the other two, making it even more of a foregone conclusion. But she didn't.

Though the ABC era's multiple eliminations have brought some interesting SFF interactions of their own. Right off the bat, Season 16 had a very similar final 3 as Season 10--two country singers, one male and one female, and a second female singer. But the difference is, this was the era of multiple eliminations, so the finale was a three-way--and unlike future seasons on ABC where even the finale was a performance episode as well, Season 16's finale was a pure results show, so no second round of voting after the 3rd-place contestant was knocked out. And that allowed the non-country singer to win. Which has nothing on Season 18, because that was 2020 and it was vastly compressed due to the pandemic. Now, the demographics of Idol suggest that whites have an advantage over minorities, and men have an advantage over women, and to a lesser extent, the hierarchy of regions of the US is South > Midwest > West > Northeast. But when you have a five-way finale featuring three white male Californians (one Hispanic), a Nepalese immigrant man from Kansas, and a black nonbinary Harlemite Latina, well, you can throw Idolmetrics on its head; the last two members of that list were the runner-up and winner respectively.

60. Kirby vs. Dante vs. Sephiroth vs. Sonic the Hedgehog (2008) R4

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/a/a4b84bae.jpg

Kirby 23.1% 31357
Dante 16.9% 22947
Sephiroth 38.5% 52270
Sonic the Hedgehog 21.5% 29182
TOTAL VOTES 135756
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Kirby_vs_Dante_vs_Sephiroth_vs_Sonic_the_Hedgehog_2008
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3303-contest-quarterfinal-kirby-dante-sephiroth-sonic

Some upsets are not entirely unexpected. A character that is the slight favorite loses a match, or a game that everyone knows has a chance but no one wants to pull the trigger on pulls out a win. However, there are some upsets which truly come out of nowhere, that were only speculated about as Wouldnt it be crazy kind of jokes, and which no one sees coming at all. Kirbys performance in this match is one of those latter kinds of upsets. Believe it or not, this was actually Kirbys first performance against a Noble Nine member, and with the kind of numbers he put up its hard to see how he never got here before.

4 way contests had not initially been good to Kirby. Back in 2007, he had become the first major character to fall victim to L-Block, with the LFF between him and Donkey Kong draining away any residual advantage he had over the Tetris Block. And while he remained a fan favorite on the board, that loss, as controversial as it was, had caused his star to fade somewhat going into 2008, a perspective that was not helped any after his Round 1 match against Big Boss. The thing with Big Boss is that, especially at this time, he was extremely pic dependent. We thought we knew what to expect, as he had received a melty old man Big Boss pic in R1 in both 05 and 07, and only received a Naked Snake picture once he made it to R2 in 07. Well, in 2008, Bacon decided to completely flip that script and give Big Boss his Naked Snake picture in Round 1, turning an expected close match with Kirby into an easy victory for Big Boss. Kirbys reputation, previously on the downturn, dipped even further.

However, it turned out that what LFF taketh away it can giveth as well, and if Kirby had been one of the most prominent victims of it in 2007, one year later he would turn around and be one of its biggest beneficiaries instead. The division Kirby had been placed in (Division 7) was an interesting one. The only division not to contain a Noble Nine Member, it had been set up seemingly as a battleground between the biggest badass characters not in that group: Master Chief, Dante, Leon, Big Boss. The problem with that was, being a badass in gaming in the year 2008 meant that you werent allowed to be very colorful. The match pics for these guys were full of the blacks and grays and camos that were so popular at the time, and when that was all put together at once, an opportunity emerged for the pink pufball. As the only spot of color in a series of increasingly drab and monochrome match pics, Kirby popped, and he would ride this Stand Out Factor all the way out of the division, finishing in first place in his next two matches, and helping to knock out his previous rival Big Boss and division favorite Master Chief along the way.

The next round would be the Quarterfinals, and as far as most people were concerned, that was the end of the line for Kirbys run. As opposed to his previous two rounds, this one would consist of four characters with four relatively distinct fanbases, and not one but two Noble Niners. Sonic had shown some weakness by finishing in second behind Auron in Round 2, but even taking that into account, him and Sephiroth both were just a notch above Kirbys level. It turned out however, that Kirbys previous two victories hadnt just been isolated incidents. Him making it this far had caused him to build up a ton of momentum and Kirby jumped out in front of Sonic as soon as the match started. And then he stayed there. What seemed like an initial burst of board support quickly proved to be something more enduring as Kirbys lead over Sonic kept going up and up and up. Sonic would bring the percentage down with the Day Vote, but it wouldnt do anything to help him much overall. Kirby had gotten his revenge for 2007, and he had gotten it in style, becoming the next character to eliminate a Noble Niner in a contest match. Pretty good for his first time facing one.

I honestly feel like this match gets forgotten about in the annals of non-Noble Nine characters finishing ahead of Noble Niners. Heck, Kirby beating Sephiroth thanks to Cloud LFF gets more attention than this one. Maybe it's because we already saw Auron beat Sonic earlier in the contest, so the novelty of Sonic losing wasn't there.

This is probably the third most notable match Kirby was involved in for this contest. Big Boss > Kirby in Round 1 and Snake > Cloud > Kirby > Seph in the semis are both ahead of it, I think.

LeonhartFour posted...

I honestly feel like this match gets forgotten about in the annals of non-Noble Nine characters finishing ahead of Noble Niners. Heck, Kirby beating Sephiroth thanks to Cloud LFF gets more attention than this one. Maybe it's because we already saw Auron beat Sonic earlier in the contest, so the novelty of Sonic losing wasn't there.

The fact that the match also featured Kirby beating Dante probably overshadowed it as well...

People considered if Dante could upset Sonic, not Kirby. It was pretty wild.

59. Draven vs. Solid Snake vs. Samus Aran (2013) R5

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/833cb901.jpg

Draven 49.13% 73396
Solid Snake 32.81% 49025
Samus Aran 18.06% 26981
TOTAL VOTES 149402
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(3)Draven_vs_(1)Solid_Snake_vs_(1)Samus_Aran_2013
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5266-character-battle-ix-final-draven-vs-solid-snake-vs-samus

When the rallies arrived in 2015, we capitulated to them with grim acceptance, but 2013 was different. This was the first time that we had seen the kind of contest-ruining rallies that would overwhelm everything and our first instinct was to fight back, or at the very least search around to find a way to fight back. Because of these repeated, failed attempts, each Draven match was a mini-tragedy in its own separate way. In Round 1, Draven would come out of nowhere, halfway into the match, surprising us all and leaving us to wonder what would have happened if the rally had caught fire just two hours or so later. Then in R2, when we still had some naive hope that the rallies had been a one time thing, the match was overwhelmed immediately by the most dominant show of force LoL would pull off all contest. Then in R3well, well get to that match later. In R4, we had a temporary moment of hope when the admins of the LoL subreddit started taking down rally posts, but it turned out that that had been due to the subterfuge of SBAllens wife and after a presumably behind the scenes dressing down from CNET, Allen would publicly repudiate any attempts at stopping the rallies, at least officially.

And so that brought us to this, a Finals Match which aside from Draven featured a predictable appearance by Snake, and a less predictable appearance by Samus, who had taken advantage of a mess of split votes/rallies in the bottom third of the bracket. The date of the match held both promise and peril. The day of the Finals happened to correspond with a major League of Legends tournament, which might have brought a greater than average number of LoL fans onto its subreddit, but also ensured that there would be a greater than average amount of message churn for any rally attempts to get lost in. All of our attempts to block Draven in R3 had seemingly exhausted us when he came up again in R4, but by the time of this match, we had gotten a second wind, and there was one final push made to block Draven and do some rallying of our own. Draven would start the match in the lead as usual, but this time it wasnt overwhelming. Snake would start to make gains overnight, aided by tweets of support from David Hayter and HIDEO ****ING KOJIMA, and managed to get the lead down to only 232 votes, the closest anyone had come since Round 1 to beating Draven. A rally from LoL would take off in the dead of night though, and by morning Draven had once again built up a several thousand vote lead.

Around mid-morning though, something started happening. Snake was coming back, aided by a series of memorable tweets from David Hayter who had clearly made it a personal mission to see that Snake won the day. Even Jennifer Hale, the voice actress of the other character in the match abandoned her previous support for Samus and jumped on the rally for Snake as well. The theory that the LoL tournament would drive the fanbase to distraction, previously dismissed as a pipe dream, seemed to actually be coming true. Snake would come back over 2,000 votes in a matter of hours, and by early afternoon he had taken Dravens lead below 1,000 and was slicing off over 100 votes each update. And this was with a rally post slowly falling down the front page of the LoL subreddit.

And then a user named Geonard showed up in the Stats Topic, falsely claiming to have been the one that created the current rally post for Draven on Reddit. According to his post, he would wait until the post got to the top of the subreddit, and then he would delete the rally, crashing Dravens support. Despite people screaming at them to delete that post, the obvious gambit had worked, and the post would eventually be passed on to the admins of the LoL subreddit, who, tired of all the back and forth with GameFAQS just threw up their hands and pinned a rally topic to the top of the subreddit. Dravens votes would spike to heaven almost immediately, and the promise of the last three or four hours went up in smoke. Draven would run away with a victory yet again, and he would do so based on a (either intentionally or not) treacherous post from one of our own, possibly the greatest tragedy of all.

Geonard is Smurf, by the way. He was behind a lot of the Pokemon rallying that year, too (or at least he claimed to be).

But yeah, even though Snake didn't win, the LoL invaders were clearly shook to the point that they had to resort to a dirty trick, so I consider it a moral victory of sorts.

Sounds like a draggy crow

Starcraft didn't ruin the contest. Even if it had beaten Melee, it would've been trucked by FFVII.

You have to wonder if there is an alternate universe where Draven doesn't happen, and David Hayter and Hideo Kojima end up rooting on Snake to take advantage of Nintendo LFF in the best shot anyone on GameFAQs would ever have of toppling Link.

I was around for 2013, and I don't remember all this potential comeback from Snake. I know we had all placed our final hope on him, but I only remember seeing the final total and thinking "welp, GG."

That means you probably didn't check on the results until after the rally got pinned since this all happened in the middle of the night

58. Super Mario Bros. vs. The Legend of Zelda vs. Super Mario Bros. 3 vs. Super Mario World (2009) R4

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/13051689.jpg
Super Mario Bros. 11.07% 12922
The Legend of Zelda 28.97% 33816
Super Mario Bros. 3 29% 33855
Super Mario World 30.96% 36149
TOTAL VOTES 116742
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._vs_The_Legend_of_Zelda_vs_Super_Mario_Bros._3_vs_Super_Mario_World_2009
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3502-contest-quarterfinal-smb-1-zelda-i-smb-3-smw

In a contest full of split votes, where one game could, depending on the other games in the match, go from boosting far ahead to falling hopelessly behind within a single round, this match should have had the biggest split of all. Three Mario games whose histories were inextricably intertwined up against one game from a different series: Zelda 1. Everyone knew that Zelda would take advantage of the split votes, the only question was, by how much? It was clear that Zelda would get its revenge on Mario 1, which had pulled off an upset by finishing ahead of Zelda 1 for two rounds straight, but would Zelda be able to beat at least one of the other two Mario games and advance? And if it did beat one of them, which one would it be? The two Marios had been party to their own intra-Nintendo upset in the previous round, as SMW surprised everyone by almost finishing in first ahead of SMB3. How would the presence of two additional Nintendo games disrupt that narrow victory? To make things simple, we had a lot of questions.

Zelda 1s potential success was relevant not just for its own sake, but for its implications on contest matches several rounds down the line as well. The very next round, the first Semifinal, would almost certainly include both FFVII and LttP, so if Zelda 1 was able to progress to that round it could potentially leech LttP enough to allow whichever Mario game was also present to sneak past it into the finals. And *then* in the Finals, the presence, or lack thereof of a fellow Zelda game could have a noticeable effect on OoTs performance. The head swims with all the scenarios and counterscenarios that could ensue from just one small change in a match result, and more than most others, this match encapsulates all the chaos that swirled around in the four way format.

The match started, and while the previous rounds results reversed themselves (SMW > SMB3, LoZ > SMB) everything else seemed to be falling into place for a quiet result. Zelda 1 wasnt too far off in third, but the two big Mario games remained in first and second, and it looked like they would be the ones advancing into the Semifinal, putting to rest any fears of trouble for LttP. SMW gradually built up a lead over SMB3, which itself gradually built up a lead over Zelda 1. There wasnt much reason to expect much to change from these initial results; we were talking about four games with a near identical fanbase after all. And then, in the morning, a brief hiccup. Zelda started making cuts in SMB3s lead for a couple of hours during the Morning Vote, and while SMB3 would pad its lead back up to 1450 with the Midday Vote, it seemed like we actually might get some vote shifts after all. Vote shifts, but not a comeback, that is. Zelda 1 was almost 1,500 votes behind in a four way match. The only comebacks/comeback attempts to be pulled off to that magnitude in this format had been stuff like Axel/Frog or Sandbag/Magus, matches involving characters with completely incompatible vote trends. If Zelda 1 wanted to actually finish in second, it would have to pull off one of the biggest proportional comebacks of all time against a game it overlapped with in fanbase almost entirely.

And thats exactly what Zelda started to do as the ASV rolled in. Zelda had always been a bit stronger with the ASV than the Mario series was, and this match was no exception. What started off as some trickles of votes here and there turned into an all out deluge after 2:30, as Super Mario Bros. 3s percentage just collapsed and Zelda 1 started running away with things. Update after update, the cuts kept coming, as Zelda pulled off the kind of ASV turnaround we were used to only seeing from Kingdom Hearts and Halo. That near biggest comeback of all time it needed to pull off turned out to be not so hard to pull off after all, and while Zelda slowed down as the evening set in, with half an hour left in the match, it would pull ahead of SMB3, setting the stage for a photo finish.

The thing is though, Mario has a reputation. After winning a trio of matches under suspicious circumstances in the first two contests, Mario had become Public Enemy No. 1 to the contest community, *the* villain of the contests. That was 2002/2003 however. His reputation had been rehabbed in subsequent years, and his tendency to pull out a clutch when needed was well behind him, just an old trick. But, as it turned out, just because you dont have to use your clutch, doesnt mean its not still there. 15 minutes before the end of the match, at a time when the lead was moving up and down by ~ 5 votes each update, SMB3 gained a massive 53 extra votes. That would end up putting SMB3 safely ahead of Zelda 1 for the time needed to run out the clock, and ensured its spot in the next round. Maybe some old tricks werent so old after all.

The Mario Clutch was needed to ensure the correct outcome

Fantastic outcome, even if it might have ruined the chances of one of them making the final.

57. Ganondorf vs. Magus (2003) R2

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1ef34b44.jpg

Ganondorf 49.7% 54529
Magus 50.3% 55179
TOTAL VOTES 109708
https://board8.fandom.com/wiki/(12)Ganondorf_vs_(13)Magus_2003
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1338-north-division-round-2-ganondorf-vs-magus

Ive written numerous times so far about how hyped Magus was going into 2003, and Ill say it again! Weve never had an entrant generate the pre-contest amount of hype that Magus did going into 2003. He would be as popular as Crono! Possibly even more so! He could take down virtually any character in the bracket except Link and Mario! That might be overstating things somewhat, but there were very few characters that we thought had the possibility to give Magus trouble. And then when the bracket was released it turned out that in addition to the indignity of receiving a 13 seed, Magus would be fed to one of those few characters that could beat him in Round 3. There really was a sense that Magus had been completely wasted in the bracket. He would have perfunctory victories over Sam Fisher and Ganondorf, and then a perfunctory loss to Link. The close matches we could have seen

Round 1 came and Magus won decisively against Sam Fisher, albeit by a little less than someone on Cronos level might be expected to. But, who knows, maybe Sam Fisher was more popular that we were giving him credit for. Next up would be Ganondorf, who himself had struggled to beat Tidus in Round 1. Now there was a comparison everyone could agree on. Magus might or might not be on Cronos level, but he was certainly not on Tiduss, and thus Ganondorf should be no trouble at all. (Side note: As far as I can tell, Ganondorf/Tidus and Sam/Magus are the first matches to ever have their updates tracked and recorded. Team Rocket Elite posted links to his results in the Stats Topic of the time, but as they were Geocities sites, Im afraid the results might have been lost to history, although I could swear Ive seen the Ganondorf/Tidus results pop up somewhere.)

And for the first six hours of the poll, Ganondorf wasnt any trouble. He was doing well, a bit better than expected, but unlike in latter years, Maguss Board Vote would not collapse right away, and he sat at roughly 54% of the vote all through the Power Hour and the First Night Vote. By the time the next day started to dawn, Magus had built up a near 1,800 vote lead, a seemingly insurmountable one that would have required the largest comeback we had ever seen to overcome. When the Day Vote started however, it became clear that Ganondorf was going to try. In update after update, Ganondorf would slice into the lead, keeping up a rapid clip all throughout the morning and early afternoon. By 8:00 AM, Magus was at 53%, at 9:15 he was down to 52%, and by 11:00 AM CST, Ganondorf had finally taken Magus down below 51% for good. And he kept going. 1,500 votes had been the largest comeback ever pulled off at this point, and by early afternoon, Ganondorf had surpassed that, bringing Maguss lead down to ~200 votes. The board, after all this, was in shock. Maguss strength had been taken as an article of faith by many, and to see him on the verge of losing to someone from a lower tier was almost incomprehensible.

Was Magus already a fraud in 03? In a way, yes. Something he was not yet though, was a choke artist, and by mid-afternoon he had slowed Ganondorfs gains, and by late afternoon/early evening he had stopped them entirely. The Gerudo had come very close to pulling off a massive (board) upset, but this was as far as he would go. Magus would regroup with the Second Night Vote, and manage to narrowly make his way into the Sweet Sixteen lin the end. At the time, this match was seen as a disaster for Magus, and with his subsequent history that reputation certainly tracks. In hindsight though, the match was really something of a triumph, one of the only ones that Magus would ever get. To imagine him beating someone like Ganondorf in a nailbiter and making it to the Sweet Sixteen seems like a surreal vision at this point, and in a way in 2003 it was as well, just for different reasons.

Ngamer has all the Stats Topics archived on his site.

He also has some of those manual text updates. Not sure if Magus/Ganondorf is one of them.

This match was the first one I spent all day refreshing my computer. I forgot how obsessed I was with the character contests.

Leonhart4 posted...

Ngamer has all the Stats Topics archived on his site.

He also has some of those manual text updates. Not sure if Magus/Ganondorf is one of them.

Magus/Ganondorf is saved, although the last part of the match is missing; I used it for the writeup. I'm not sure about the other ones.

It is kind of funny that Magus was thought to be such an overwhelming favorite by Board 8 at the time, when the Magus's prediction percentages for both Round 1 and 2, as well as Ganon's prediction percentage from Round 1, suggest that this was a rather contentious four pack all around.