| rdfs:comment
| - Last year's Round 1 was only a warmup. THIS was the most debated match of any contest's Round 1, ever. In all honesty, it will probably always will be. It was easily debated more than ANY other potential match, period - other than the natural continuation of it NEXT round. There were some that warned of him being the next Balthier, or worse - some had Zack so low as to fall to Cecil. Most had him losing to Wario here, and Zack vs Shadow was considered THE match of Division 1. Get it right, and you get who got out of the division correct. Time would only tell.
|
| abstract
| - Last year's Round 1 was only a warmup. THIS was the most debated match of any contest's Round 1, ever. In all honesty, it will probably always will be. It was easily debated more than ANY other potential match, period - other than the natural continuation of it NEXT round. And of course, it was all due to one character - Mr. Buster Sword, Black-Haired Cloud, the TRUE hero of Final Fantasy VII - ZACK FAIR. (aka Zack UNfair, Zack Attack, aka "I'll Crisis your Core"). This one character, given all of about five minutes of screentime in FF7 - most of it in optional, out of the way sequences - and his own game on that juggernaut of portable systems, the PSP. ...okay. So with any other character, Zack being uber-fodder would have been a given. But because he had the FF7 pedigree, because he's the spitting image of Cloud and bore his sword, and because Random Piece of Final Fantasy VII furniture would probably have won the contest this year, he was given all the consideration in the world, and then some. There were some that warned of him being the next Balthier, or worse - some had Zack so low as to fall to Cecil. Most had him losing to Wario here, and Zack vs Shadow was considered THE match of Division 1. Get it right, and you get who got out of the division correct. Well, after enough discussion that even thinking about it now still brings on a migraine, the match was at hand. And upon looking at the picture, Zack had everything going his way - not only did he have the Buster Sword prominently displayed in his picture, it's probably more accurate to say his picture WAS more the Buster Sword. Zack had zero excuses. ...and he didn't need them, because he started off the match on fire and didn't let up. Wario, who advanced to Round 2 last year behind Fox and getting his debut in SSBB, got absolutely CURBSTOMPED en route to a routing, and the first big conventional wisdom in the contest - BrawlFEAR - was suddenly in terrible doubt (funny how since I popularized that term, none of its subjects have really warranted the terror, huh?). Zack, despite Cecil in the match, looked better than even his most ardent supporters had expected - and that luster would only glow brighter once the rest of the field started performing. But that would be seen later. Wario, for his part, had no excuse - no matter how strong Zack was, the only Nintendo option in the match should look somewhat good, right? The last thing to note about this match was how Cecil did - absolutely pitifully. This was perhaps to be expected considering what he did last time, but between FF4 DS and him having a more recognizable picture this time, it was perhaps not unwarranted to expect more. And after what the rest of FF4 did this contest, I have to postulate that Zack had a pretty fair (oh I slay myself) amount of overlap with Cecil here. That was downright scary. The rumblings began - could he make it into the semifinals? Against Mario and Mega Man X? Time would only tell.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)