Christi Junior on Nostr: #BestVidyaGirlContest 2024 Post-Tournament Analysis (Round 2 Matches) ROUND 2, MATCH ...
#BestVidyaGirlContest 2024 Post-Tournament Analysis (Round 2 Matches)
ROUND 2, MATCH 1:
1st Seed Samus Aran (Metroid) VS 16th Seed Tifa Lockhart (Final Fantasy VII)
Samus: 88 votes
Tifa: 64 votes
Holy shit, what a match to kick off round 2! Samus VS Tifa might just be THE single most iconic vidya Waifu matchup imaginable. Samus is obviously the top gaming heroine out there, and Tifa is definitely a contender when it comes to the #2 spot (though maybe not on Fedi). Both of them are also badass action girls who successfully avoid veering into Girlboss territory, and thus remain extremely appealing to male gamers. The fact that these girls for a long time were on opposite sides of the console wars (until Final Fantasy VII was finally made available on a Nintendo system in 2019) just helped make their rivalry all the more spicy.
That said, it always was something of a one-sided rivalry, due to Samus just being in a league of her own among female vidya characters. In the GameFAQs Character Battles (after which this very contest is modeled), Samus and Tifa have squared off 4 times. One match was a narrow Samus win. The other 3 matches were *comfortable* Samus wins. And keep in mind, FF7 was at one point THE game that defined GameFAQs, so Tifa arguably enjoyed home field advantage for these matches. On Fedi, things have looked a lot worse for her – based on their respective vidya girl contest season 1 performances, Samus was projected to *break 70%* on the JRPG martial artist!
However, that’s what made round 1 of this current tournament so fascinating – Tifa didn’t just outperform Samus here, she so thoroughly outclassed the Metroid heroine that you’d think this match was gonna be a total blowout in her favor! Sure, you might argue that a single match doesn’t mean much in the face of so many years of history that shows Samus being the more popular girl, but on this occasion the power gap was so huge that for Samus to win in round 2, we likely needed not just her to seriously step up her game, we also needed Tifa to have at least partially run out of steam. As such, for once this classic matchup had real potential for either a spectacular upset, or an unusually competitive battle.
For all that buildup, what we ended up with was sadly a massive disappointment; as always seems to happen when people are foolish enough to doubt her, Samus went out and immediately silenced said doubters. The bounty hunter babe immediately took a solid lead, and during the early stages of the match she was Doubling Tifa remarkably consistently – we’re talking 8-4, 12-6, 18-9, hell, eventually even 30-15! And really, by that point the match was already over; Samus is NOT a girl you pull off epic comebacks against, she’s just too popular, people like and respect her too much, her appeal is too universal. To beat Samus, you basically have to manage to keep up with her for 24 hours straight – and the longest any girl in these contests has ever lasted is 2 hours. So yeah…
Tifa did show signs of life, and eventually did a good job lowering Samus’s percentage lead, but her vote lead was never seriously threatened. Tifa was getting decent enough match thread support, much more than in last season’s disastrous outing against Shanoa, but nothing like the lovefest she experienced in her round 1 match. In the end, this was neither Super Tifa or Shitty Tifa, but Regular Tifa, and Regular Tifa clearly stands no chance against Samus.
Even so, in the grand scheme of things Tifa did perform admirably, assuming that the Etna match was a fluke and that Samus was now back to her old self. Breaking 40% on Samus would normally mark Tifa as a legitimately Elite competitor, and considering how last season’s projections had her failing to break 30%, she’d obviously improved by leaps and bounds. Also, do you know how the last couple of Samus VS Tifa matches on GameFAQs went? That’s right, both matches ended 58% - 42% in favor of Samus, so Tifa has gone from horrendously underperforming on Fedi to being right in line with reasonable (maybe even optimistic) projections.
But obviously, the big story here is Samus being back on track. While I at this point of the tourney still didn’t believe that she was already back to 100% power (nowadays I’m much more inclined to believe she was), this match obviously represented a massive improvement over the Etna embarrassment. Remilia in the quarterfinals now seemed like a cakewalk (unless the vampire girl also managed to recover lost strength), so the real question was whether Pyra or 2B (most likely Pyra) would pose a problem in the semifinals.
Oh, and while this particular bout proved to be a major letdown, we’d already by the second match of round 2 see things get a lot more interesting.
ROUND 2, MATCH 1:
1st Seed Samus Aran (Metroid) VS 16th Seed Tifa Lockhart (Final Fantasy VII)
Samus: 88 votes
Tifa: 64 votes
Holy shit, what a match to kick off round 2! Samus VS Tifa might just be THE single most iconic vidya Waifu matchup imaginable. Samus is obviously the top gaming heroine out there, and Tifa is definitely a contender when it comes to the #2 spot (though maybe not on Fedi). Both of them are also badass action girls who successfully avoid veering into Girlboss territory, and thus remain extremely appealing to male gamers. The fact that these girls for a long time were on opposite sides of the console wars (until Final Fantasy VII was finally made available on a Nintendo system in 2019) just helped make their rivalry all the more spicy.
That said, it always was something of a one-sided rivalry, due to Samus just being in a league of her own among female vidya characters. In the GameFAQs Character Battles (after which this very contest is modeled), Samus and Tifa have squared off 4 times. One match was a narrow Samus win. The other 3 matches were *comfortable* Samus wins. And keep in mind, FF7 was at one point THE game that defined GameFAQs, so Tifa arguably enjoyed home field advantage for these matches. On Fedi, things have looked a lot worse for her – based on their respective vidya girl contest season 1 performances, Samus was projected to *break 70%* on the JRPG martial artist!
However, that’s what made round 1 of this current tournament so fascinating – Tifa didn’t just outperform Samus here, she so thoroughly outclassed the Metroid heroine that you’d think this match was gonna be a total blowout in her favor! Sure, you might argue that a single match doesn’t mean much in the face of so many years of history that shows Samus being the more popular girl, but on this occasion the power gap was so huge that for Samus to win in round 2, we likely needed not just her to seriously step up her game, we also needed Tifa to have at least partially run out of steam. As such, for once this classic matchup had real potential for either a spectacular upset, or an unusually competitive battle.
For all that buildup, what we ended up with was sadly a massive disappointment; as always seems to happen when people are foolish enough to doubt her, Samus went out and immediately silenced said doubters. The bounty hunter babe immediately took a solid lead, and during the early stages of the match she was Doubling Tifa remarkably consistently – we’re talking 8-4, 12-6, 18-9, hell, eventually even 30-15! And really, by that point the match was already over; Samus is NOT a girl you pull off epic comebacks against, she’s just too popular, people like and respect her too much, her appeal is too universal. To beat Samus, you basically have to manage to keep up with her for 24 hours straight – and the longest any girl in these contests has ever lasted is 2 hours. So yeah…
Tifa did show signs of life, and eventually did a good job lowering Samus’s percentage lead, but her vote lead was never seriously threatened. Tifa was getting decent enough match thread support, much more than in last season’s disastrous outing against Shanoa, but nothing like the lovefest she experienced in her round 1 match. In the end, this was neither Super Tifa or Shitty Tifa, but Regular Tifa, and Regular Tifa clearly stands no chance against Samus.
Even so, in the grand scheme of things Tifa did perform admirably, assuming that the Etna match was a fluke and that Samus was now back to her old self. Breaking 40% on Samus would normally mark Tifa as a legitimately Elite competitor, and considering how last season’s projections had her failing to break 30%, she’d obviously improved by leaps and bounds. Also, do you know how the last couple of Samus VS Tifa matches on GameFAQs went? That’s right, both matches ended 58% - 42% in favor of Samus, so Tifa has gone from horrendously underperforming on Fedi to being right in line with reasonable (maybe even optimistic) projections.
But obviously, the big story here is Samus being back on track. While I at this point of the tourney still didn’t believe that she was already back to 100% power (nowadays I’m much more inclined to believe she was), this match obviously represented a massive improvement over the Etna embarrassment. Remilia in the quarterfinals now seemed like a cakewalk (unless the vampire girl also managed to recover lost strength), so the real question was whether Pyra or 2B (most likely Pyra) would pose a problem in the semifinals.
Oh, and while this particular bout proved to be a major letdown, we’d already by the second match of round 2 see things get a lot more interesting.