Christi Junior on Nostr: It was always clear that Remilia had performed admirably in this match, but knowing ...

It was always clear that Remilia had performed admirably in this match, but knowing now just how overpowered Samus turned out to be in this contest, what Remilia managed to do was nothing short of incredible. Remilia proved able to fully keep up with Samus well into vote counts in the 130s, and even after 185 votes, Samus only lead 52% - 48%. And the eventual 46-54 loss was still significantly better than any other girl managed to do against Samus. Whether or not Remilia truly was the second strongest girl of this tournament is still up for debate in my opinion (for starters, the match vote counts just kept increasing, and Samus kept powering up), but nothing should take away from Remilia’s fantastic showing.

For her part, Samus had with this match not only shown that she could still thrive in a contest with dramatically boosted vote counts, but she had even broken Patchouli’s record for most individual votes received in a single match, despite facing a much stronger opponent. And if Samus could beat the Scarlet Devil herself by 20 votes, it was suddenly hard to imagine an underling like Pache managing to overcome the Metroid heroine. Of course, there was still at least one Touhou girl who could reasonably be expected to be not only stronger than Remilia, but stronger than Samus as well…

In that sense, Samus’s somewhat narrow win over Remilia was the best possible result for this tournament as a whole – a Remilia win would have set the stage for Total Touhou Tyranny and endless butthurt, while a Samus blowout would pretty much have killed the entire tournament. But Samus “only” scoring 54% on Remilia? All the way up to Reimu’s long-awaited clash with Samus, there was actually a very good case to be made that the shrine maiden, being the main character of the Touhou series, was not only stronger than Remilia, but so much stronger than her that Samus was looking like something of an underdog. I’ve made the Reimu-Remilia, Cloud-Sephiroth comparison before, but I still think it seemed like a very reasonable one to make when looking at just how much stronger a main character is than the second most popular character/single most popular villain. And in the GameFAQs Character Battles, I’ve seen someone like Solid Snake go from defeating Sephiroth 53-47 to losing 48-52 to Cloud. Again, Samus only got 54% against Remilia…

Now of course we know better, but right after this match had taken place Samus was still looking borderline beatable, entirely due to Remilia’s Herculean efforts. The fact that a girl who already boasted immense natural strength had needed to go absolutely all out just to barely bring Samus below 55% wasn’t fully comprehended at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can now fully appreciate what Remilia managed to accomplish – actually making a Samus match competitive and exciting! Hell, this particular match even produced some original memes created specifically for this moment, making the “true final” of the tournament feel all the more special.

#BestVidyaGirlContest