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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - Midwest Region 2nd Round: 11 Monster Hunter: World vs. 3 The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
2026 Video Game Madness - Midwest Region 2nd Round
Midwest Region Round of 32 Matchup Preview: 11 Monster Hunter: World vs. 3 The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
The Game That Opened a Genre to the West Against the Sequel That Had Everything to Prove
Monster Hunter: World beat Half-Life: Alyx in overtime, which is a result that deserves its own moment of recognition before anything else is discussed about this matchup.
Half-Life: Alyx is the highest-rated VR game ever made. It scored a 93 on Metacritic. It is Valve returning to a franchise that the gaming world had been asking them to return to for over a decade. It is the definitive demonstration of what virtual reality is capable of as a storytelling and gameplay medium, a game that people pointed to whenever someone asked whether VR was worth taking seriously, because the answer was this game and this game alone was sufficient to settle the argument. It entered the Midwest bracket as the 6 seed with every reason to expect to advance against an 11 seed.
Monster Hunter: World scored a 90 on Metacritic. It is an 11 seed. It won in overtime.
Understanding why that happened requires understanding what Monster Hunter: World means to its fanbase, which is something that its review score and sales figures capture only partially. The Monster Hunter series had existed since 2004 and had built a dedicated following in Japan across multiple portable platforms. The games were complex, demanding, and built around a loop of hunting increasingly powerful creatures, harvesting their materials, and crafting better equipment to hunt even more powerful creatures. That loop was deeply satisfying for players who engaged with it, but the barrier to entry was high enough that many Western players had bounced off the series without ever getting far enough to feel the satisfaction.
World changed that. Capcom smoothed the onboarding process, created a living ecosystem where monsters interacted with each other in ways that made the world feel genuinely alive, released on consoles and PC simultaneously for the first time, and produced a game that sold over 21 million copies and became the best-selling game in Capcom's history at the time of release. The Western Monster Hunter community that World created is enormous, and it is organized, and it showed up in overtime against one of the most technically accomplished games of its era and won.
Now Monster Hunter: World faces a game that had one of the most difficult assignments in recent gaming history and met it with a 96 Metacritic score.
The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom had to follow Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is this tournament's overall 1 seed. It scored a 97 on Metacritic. It won every major game of the year award in 2017. It is regarded by a significant portion of the gaming world as one of the greatest games ever made. Building a sequel to that game without simply replicating it, without being overshadowed by it, without either playing it too safe or departing so far from its principles that it felt like a different series entirely, was a design challenge of extraordinary difficulty.
Tears of the Kingdom met that challenge by expanding Breath of the Wild's open world vertically rather than horizontally. The sky islands above Hyrule and the depths below it added entirely new dimensions to exploration. The Ultrahand, Fuse, Ascend, and Recall abilities gave players a set of tools so flexible and so generative that the community spent months after launch discovering new things you could build and new problems you could solve in ways that no one had anticipated. The game sold over 21 million copies and co-won the 2023 Metacritic Game of the Year alongside Baldur's Gate 3.
It beat Ghost of Tsushima 4-2 in the Round of 64, a comfortable result that confirmed its fanbase is present and voting. A score of 4-2 in this bracket is not a blowout, but it is a decisive win, and it tells you that Tears of the Kingdom's voters arrived at this tournament with the intention of going deep.
Monster Hunter: World won in overtime against a 93-rated game. Tears of the Kingdom won 4-2 against a game that won the TGA Player's Voice award in 2020. Two very different kinds of strength meeting in the Midwest's Round of 32, with the winner advancing to the Super Sixteen.
The Midwest bracket continues March 22. 12PM.
