1st Seed Samus Aran (Metroid) VS 32nd Seed Yuri (Doki Doki Literature Club)
Samus: 60 votes
Yuri: 19 votes
In hindsight, this match obviously cemented Samus as the big favorite to win it all, though I initially only viewed her victory as good, but not great. I was used to the GameFAQs Character Battles, where it’s common for top seeded characters to at the very least break 80% on their opponents. Not always of course – Mario still made the finals in 2002 after doing whatever the hell this was supposed to be in round 1:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/940-north-division-round-1-mario-vs-servbot
But monster-blowouts are USUALLY how these things go, and my pre-match stance was that Samus would have to break 80% on Yuri to TRULY impress. 76% - 24%, getting more than triple the amount of votes as Yuri, was still a strong performance, but good enough to truly intimidate the competition? At the very least I expected Reimu to put up bigger numbers against Cerberus.
However, it turned out that Samus not only had scored the biggest win of the competition in this match, but it wasn’t even close – outside of bonus matches, no other girl even broke 70% on her opponent! I later on realized that I had failed to take quite a few things into account – first of all, this was only a 32-character tournament, whereas most GameFAQs tournaments featured at least 64 entrants, meaning that even judged by those standards, this was effectively a *Round 2* match, where scoring 76% suddenly looks pretty damn beastly. Case in point:
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/983-south-division-round-2-strider-hiryu-vs-link
Yep, that’s Link, someone who’s so overpowered that he should have been permanently banned from the character battles 15 years ago, *almost* scoring 76% against absolute Fodder in Round 2. Oh, and on that note, apart from Seele (and we’ll get to her stillborn contest run eventually, don’ you worry), I’d argue not a single girl in this tournament qualified as outright Fodder. Look at Yuri for example – she’s a cute Yandere with long hair from a pretty famous meme game well known for its cute girls, and she has over 1K pictures on Gelbooru. Some people will just vote for the girl they find hotter (which is 100% legitimate in a Waifu competition like this), and Yuri arguably had the match pic advantage. Not to mention, Fedi is a pretty contrarian place, adoring all things niche and meme-worthy, while often being very hostile to Normalfag favorites.
And yet despite all that, Samus STILL more than tripled the DDLC girl! You could argue that this was partially due to the low vote totals at the start of the tournament, but honestly, do you think *Samus* of all people would be hurt by more people voting? If anything, the fact that Samus could get 222 votes in the contest final, AND so utterly dominate a poll where only 79 users voted shows, yet again, that the bounty hunter babe always excels REGARDLESS of what circumstances she finds herself in.
As for Yuri – yeah, suffering by far the biggest loss in the tournament is not a good look, but it being against Samus takes off some of the sting. I still have no doubt that Yuri easily beats someone like Seele 1v1, and she did well just to qualify for the tournament. That said, I *do* wonder how Monika would have performed in this competition, because I definitely suspect she’s a fair bit stronger than Yuri overall. Not saying she’d avoid getting her ass whooped by Samus, but with a slightly favorable draw, I’d at least expect her to reach Round 2.
#BestVidyaGirlContest
