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BEL2026 Video Game Madness - South Regional Final (Excellent Eight): 13 NieR: Automata vs. 3 Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
2026 Video Game Madness - South Regional Final (Excellent Eight)
The 13 Seed That Would Not Stop: NieR: Automata Reaches the Four Finalists
Yoko Taro's Game Beats the Most Decorated Release of 2025 and Keeps Going
NieR: Automata defeated Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 by a score of 2-1, and the South bracket's 13 seed is going to the Four Finalists.
There is a moment in every great tournament run where the results stop being surprising and start being inevitable, where you stop asking how this team or this game keeps winning and start asking how anyone is going to stop it. NieR: Automata has reached that moment. Five rounds. Five games that were seeded higher or more broadly recognized or more recently celebrated. Five results that went to NieR: Automata's community by margins that should not have held and held every time. It has beaten the 2024 Game of the Year. It has beaten the best-selling fighting game of all time. It has beaten the game that eliminated the South's 1 seed. And now it has beaten the most decorated game of 2025. The 13 seed is in the Four Finalists and the question is no longer whether it can keep winning. The question is how far it can go.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 deserves its moment before the story of NieR: Automata continues, because what Sandfall Interactive's debut game accomplished in this tournament is itself extraordinary. It won nine awards at The Game Awards 2025. It scored a 91 on Metacritic. Guillaume Broche founded a studio during the pandemic with no release history and produced one of the finest JRPGs of the era on the first attempt, and the community that formed around it showed up at every stage of this tournament with the conviction of people who believe they are voting for something genuinely important. It beat A Plague Tale in overtime in the Round of 64. It beat Metaphor: ReFantazio in overtime in the Round of 32. It beat Resident Evil 4 Remake 3-1 in the Super Sixteen. And in the South Regional Final it came within one vote of beating the game that had beaten the 2024 GOTY and Smash Bros Ultimate and Hollow Knight: Silksong to get there.
One vote. NieR: Automata's margin in the Regional Final was one vote, which is the same margin it has produced in three of its five tournament matchups. The community behind this game arrives at every round in exactly the numbers it needs, never more and never less, and it has been doing so against opponents that had every structural advantage. Astro Bot was seeded higher. Smash Bros Ultimate had 35 million copies sold. Silksong had beaten the South's 1 seed. Expedition 33 had won nine awards at the most prestigious ceremony in gaming. None of it was enough to find one more vote than NieR: Automata's community.
Understanding what drives that community requires understanding what NieR: Automata is and what it asks of the people who play it. On the surface it is a technically accomplished action RPG from PlatinumGames, built around fluid combat and a post-apocalyptic science fiction setting. Below that surface it is something else entirely. Yoko Taro's direction produces a game whose story unfolds across multiple playthroughs, each revealing new information that changes what you thought you understood from the previous one. The questions it asks about consciousness and purpose and the nature of existence are built into the structure of the game itself, not delivered through exposition but experienced through the choices the game makes about what to show you and when. Keiichi Okabe's soundtrack is one of the finest ever composed for the medium. The game sold over eight million copies and built a community that does not carry it the way fans carry a popular game. They carry it the way people carry something that changed how they think.
NieR: Automata is published by Square Enix, which now has three of the four remaining games in VGM 2026. The dynasty that has won the last two Alexander Delaney Memorial Championships, that has made the Final Four in five of the last six tournaments, that won four of the last six ADMCs, is now represented by three of the four semifinalists. And one of those three is a 13 seed that has beaten five games to get here, carrying the Square Enix banner into the Four Finalists against The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, the overall 1 seed and the highest-scored game of the entire VGM era.
The overall 1 seed. The game with a 97 on Metacritic and every major GOTY award in 2017 and 33 million copies sold. That is what NieR: Automata faces next. It has beaten five games that were supposed to stop it. None of them did. Expedition 33 goes home as the most decorated game of 2025, beaten by one vote in the Regional Final by a run that belongs in any conversation about the most remarkable tournament stories VGM 2026 has produced.
