ROUND 1, MATCH 13 PRE-GAME ANALYSIS

7th Seed Ranni the Witch (Elden Ring) VS 26th Seed Takanashi Hoshino (Blue Archive)

Before this tournament began, I considered Hoshino over Ranni quite the juicy upset pick. Fedi loves its Lolis, and Hoshino seems like a very cute and popular one, who enjoys plenty of Fedi love (varis for example has a number of Hoshino emojis). As such, I expected the match picture factor to greatly boost Hoshino compared to her modest showing in the Qualifier poll, enough to become a tourney threat. Meanwhile, Ranni is a pretty new and untested character.

However, after seeing every single previous mobile gaming Gacha girl lose (with Seele especially completely flopping yesterday), I now consider Ranni the overwhelming favorite in tomorrow’s match. Elden Ring was the biggest game of 2022, probably the biggest game of the last few years, and Ranni is THE Elden Ring girl, with about 3 times as much gelbooru art as Melina for example. She also boasts a memorable, unique, and attractive design, monster girl appeal, Doll Ranni memes, and sick AI roasts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjD1Rlf5Juc

Ranni is also the closest we get to one of the Xenoblade catgirls being represented in this tournament:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3If_wQDf0E

And of course, she has sufficiently devoted supporters on Fedi to earn her a high seed. Against all this, Hoshino basically just boasts the powers of Cute and Funny, but Illya’s defeat already showed the limits of Lolibro support, and unlike lllya, Hoshino will probably also be hurt by Gacha anti-voting. Unless Ranni proves to be something of a fraud, Hoshino just seems to face too much of an uphill struggle to be able to break the Gacha girls’ losing streak.

#BestVidyaGirlContest