| rdfs:comment
| - It's hard to believe it now, but despite the epic Sonic bombing last year - which consisted of Sonic nearly losing to Squall twice, Tails losing to The Boss, and Knuckles needing VAAN to hold off Rikku - Knuckles was actually a tentative favorite to advance with Mario in this match. And even though Shadow had brought Sonic Team failure to new levels of epic, the tight Oracle spread between Knuckles and Zelda reveals how much the board still believed in him. The question, of course, was... why?
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| abstract
| - It's hard to believe it now, but despite the epic Sonic bombing last year - which consisted of Sonic nearly losing to Squall twice, Tails losing to The Boss, and Knuckles needing VAAN to hold off Rikku - Knuckles was actually a tentative favorite to advance with Mario in this match. And even though Shadow had brought Sonic Team failure to new levels of epic, the tight Oracle spread between Knuckles and Zelda reveals how much the board still believed in him. The question, of course, was... why? Because IT'S FREAKING MARIO! was in the match, of course. This was Mario, who had beat down Samus more brutally than Link had - and Samus was supposed to be a character that was much STRONGER than the plumber. Mario, a character powerful enough to look like he was SFFing characters like Zero, a character that could actually stand up to Link and make Sephiroth look good with the board vote against him. Meanwhile, Zelda was a name-driven character that no one but the biggest of the 'drones actually LIKED, and even the majority of those would fold in the face of IT'S FREAKING MARIO! Sure, there was Zelda's power performance on Samus in 2k6 to think about, but that was the (lol) female bracket at work... and besides, that was Samus, Queen of SFFailure. She couldn't significantly SFF the leech Ganondorf, so obviously Zelda was going to fare better. Yeah, uh huh. Like so many other debated matches, it wasn't even close. Zelda was making not one, but TWO characters look pitiful from the get-go. Yes, there was Knuckles, who even his most ardent supporters had been half-expecting to fail. But then there was MARIO, who couldn't seem to score any significant SFF on Zelda either! Based on 2005 stats, which should be even more favorable to Zelda seeing as how she had to go out against an even more dreadful looking Snake than usual, Mario gets 61% on the princess. So what does he go and do in this match? Barely get 62%. What the...? Make no mistake - if Mario had actually gone and, y'know, SFFED Zelda like he was supposed to, this could have been a match. And while you can partially chalk this up to Zelda's resilience even in the face of overpowering strength - seriously, LoZ's 43%+ on SMB3 is a damn tragedy - I hold that this was the first sign we had that this Mario of new was not the Mario of old. Can you imagine Mario 2k5 scoring barely more on Zelda than SAMUS? And ironically, Knuckles would probably be the Sonic character to come out looking best in all of this after the later rounds - 4% away from Zelda when you're probably being SFFed too, if not even worse, ain't too shabby, though you've got to figure some bracket support figures into that.
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