Group play is over, and it’s almost time for the top 768! But before we start that, we have one last thing to take care of. It’s the play-in!
As our tournament field expands, so does the number of over-the-limit songs. Our preliminary top 768 features:
21 songs from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate
18 songs from Final Fantasy VII REMAKE
16 songs from Cuphead
16 songs from 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
16 songs from Paper Mario: The Origami King
15 songs from NieR:Automata
15 songs from Sonic Mania
15 songs from Persona 5 Strikers
14 songs from Celeste
13 songs from Where the Water Tastes Like Wine
12 songs from A Hat in Time
12 songs from Splatoon 2
11 songs from Hades
11 songs from OMORI
These 65 songs will now face challengers who came just short of making the initial top 768. The winner of each head-to-head matchup makes it to the playoffs, the loser is forgotten to history.
Since this is something of a real phase of the tournament now, we’ve got multiple daily playlists!
Play-In Round 1
Play-In Round 2
Play-In Round 3
Play-In Round 4
And a playlist for all the songs that have sadly bubbled out. These are songs that fell outside the initial top 768, and were either from an overrepresented game (and thus unable to participate as challengers) or else had bad RNG tiebreakers and did not have a spot available for them. You can pay your respects here.
The play-in round is a single-elimination round! That means groups are now open for 24 hours only1. Every group ends at 9am Pacific the very next day, so be sure to vote quick! Due to the nature of the playoffs/play-in, I will also be calculating results before posting the next group, so expect group posting time to shift from ~9am to ~9:15am.
And…I think that’s it! Let the voting begin!
Voting will be live until Tuesday, March 21st at 9:00AM Pacific