#not bracket

Xenoblade Genesis will be counted for the series and be eligible for this blog when time comes for that to be relevant.

Yes, it's a Xenoblade game, not a Xenoblade Chronicles game, but same can be said for Xenoblade X, which only got Chronicles tagged on in the English localization, and we're letting that game in, so no reason to not also allow Genesis.

Obviously, the main matter here is for submissions to future brackets, which will likely be an almost half year away, so this ruling is not too important at this moment.

Whichever bracket I open submissions for after the game's release will allow submissions from Genesis (assuming the bracket doesn't end up being fully Genesis themed), but given the size of the games in this series and that this is not a re-release, there will also be a generous grace period for tagging spoilers to the best of our ability.

Depending on how far we are in whichever bracket we're running at that time, there's also the option of opening a late submission form (which is more conveniently added in for our new tournament system if we still use that by then, so that's convenient), although that might be a month or at least a couple of weeks after release because spoiler tags are one thing, but we can still try to minimize damage to people who have not gotten their blacklist set up yet (also because I want a chance to finish the game at my own pace before riffling through potential spoilery submissions).

When I laid out my concept for the rules on the Area tournament, there seemed to be a general agreement on the ruleset, but a vaild concern that the worlds would outshine specific areas if allowed to compete, even if running by a Swiss System instead of an elimination bracket was brought up.

Personally, I don't worry too much for the two reasons that someone might for instance vote for their favorite location in 2 over the entirety Alrest specifically because the entirety of Alrest also contains the rest of the areas and not just the favorite(s), and therefore it could be very possible for the worlds to lose (and interesting to see when it happens), and also because any dominating entrant would then also just mostly get pitted against other heavy hitters, making their toppling increasingly likely.

But of course, the worry is still valid, given that unlucky matchups are likely to occur particularly in early rounds, and even if not a direct elimination, it would suck for a good area to essentially have one point dumped because they got pitted against a whole world.

Now, regardless of whether worlds will compete in the tourney or not, they will also get their own countdown poll. But as for the main tourney, I do feel it's pertinent to just test the waters here.

First of all, instead of a knockout bracket, we'll run Swiss System. For those that don't know what that means here's a quick introduction:

Each round, entries are paired off against each other and will gain a point if they win. No eliminations are made during the tourney, so each round will be of the same size, seeing all entrants paired off against another entrant. The pairing is done between rounds, trying to match each entrant against another entrant with the same score as it. A pruning of the lower rankings can potentially be done after some sufficiently high amount of rounds has passed, but the format can work fine without this.

What this means is that a couple bad matchups can't cause an entrant that might be in the upper half in terms of who it could beat to get eliminated early. Similarly, there will be less need for seeding, as the tourney effectively seeds itself the further you get in, pitting entrants against similarly scored entrants will hopefully ensure that the late rounds are hydrogen bomb vs. hydrogen bomb and coughing baby vs. coughing baby.

Secondly, the entries. Instead of doing multiple tournaments for different area types, all types of areas are included in the same tournament. Thanks to the Swiss System format, it should be prevented that some type of area would fail to compete internally because another type eliminates them all (say, all settlements eliminating landmarks), and we can even then afterwards get a feel for the average scores different area types receive.

Which then brings us to valid entries. As noted, most different things you could define as an "area" will be allowed, including:

Regions: The top level menu you pick on the map screen to get to the actual map. Think Bionis' Leg in 1, Primordia in X, Gormott (Base) in 2 and Aetia in 3.

Subregions: Each region is usually divided into multiple large areas, each of which can encompass multiple things. Think Bionis' Leg: Upper Level, Gormott Province: Upper Level - Right and Aetia Region, Full (ironically not the full Aetia region, false advertisement much?). XCX DE doesn't really have these, but the districts of NLA could count since in base X, those do appear as separate submaps of the city you can select on the gamepad. For regions with just one singular subregion, such as Colony 9's "Entire Area" or Swordmarch's "Upper Sword", those don't count as subregions, just submit the region instead. The individual parts of the Cent-Omnia region will also be counted as sub-regions here, just because it feels fitting and because they use larger text than the marked locations do. Additionally, since base 3 is bad at labeling stuff, look under the minimap. It'll have potentially two lines of location name. The upper line, I'll generally define as a subregion while the lower line will define a location.

Settlements: Bunch of people live there? It's fair game. This encompasses what you could reasonably define as part of the settlement. Some settlements are in a larger region of the same name, and those will be counted separately (Colony 9 (settlement, XC1 version) for instance is located in Colony 9 (region)).

Locations: In 1 and X, those are the names written directly on the map screen, such as Gaur Plain (legally a location rather than a subregion, weird as that sounds) or Biahno Hills, X's scenic viewpoints also count under this category. Settlements would technically count as locations since they're written on the map in the same way, but in this case, Settlement classification takes precedence. 2 Has convenient location markers that you can hover over and a name pops up. 3 is weird and doesn't have locations on the map screen, see my notes in Subregions.

Landmarks: They're the things you skip travel to. For the sake of this tourney, X's FN sites are landmarks, should you for one reason or another burn to submit one of those, same goes for 3's and Torna's Rest Sites. Named Graves aren't landmarks and honestly don't even count for any category in this tourney (sorry Named Grave - Territorial Rotbart enthusiasts), even if 3 does let you skip travel to them. Depending on the game, some of them (2 in particular) might just plop a Landmark somewhere and have that function similarly to how a location would, but in this case, we're just taking the game's word for it and calling it a landmark rather than a location.

Other: If you think something could be justifiably called an area, make your case, but it's not guaranteed entry into the tourney. There's also a few places I'd definitely agree are areas that don't really fit into the former categories, such as either variation of the Land of Challenge, and those should still be allowed.

World: Bionis, Mechonis, Mira, The Cloud Sea of Alrest and Aionios are not selectable on the map screen per se, but they should still count. These five in particular are all auto included in the tourney with no need for submission.