I'm glad this has been posted here for the sake of Chrono characters. It's great to see CJayC moving quickly to start up the new contest after the long delay in the "spring" contest which started in July. I am concerned for certain characters making the bracket: namely, Magus and Frog. Frog has been in the bracket the past 2 years, and Magus the past 3, but I fear their ability to make the bracket again because of the tremendous change in the Contest Message Board's opinion on them after the Summer 2005 Contest.
First off, Crono is the 5th strongest character (some would say 6th) in the contest after Link, Cloud, Sephiroth, and Mario. He is in no danger of missing the bracket; he has made it comfortably all 4 years, and this year CJayC even spelled his name correctly on the nomination page as an example of correct spelling. (I theorize the Aeris/Aerith spelling issue is also why Aeris did not make the last 2 contests despite being a near-elite character in voting strength.) But anyway, I think Crono's past performance would get him a spot, even if he received no nominations. The contest board, of course, will not be nominating him, for the simply reason that they don't want to waste a nomination on a character who is guaranteed to get in.
Magus and Frog, on the other hand, I think are in danger. After Crono's dream run in 2002, Magus was touted as a potential contest champion on the theory that people liked him more than Crono. While few believed that, expectations were high, and Magus proceeded to beat Ganondorf and get an astounding 34.93% on Link. That's very high, for an opponent of Link. That put him up on the level of Sonic, and Magus was touted as the #1 potential Noble Nine breaker (The NN are the 9 top characters in the contests who have never lost to anyone but themselves, with a combined 95-0 or so record against outsiders. They are: Link, Cloud, Sephiroth, Mario, Crono, Samus, Megaman, Sonic, and Solid Snake.) The fact that Magus used to be the contest board's favorite character didn't hurt their optimism. Well, in 2004, Magus didn't get an opportunity to prove his worth because he had to face Crono early, and got crushed.
In 2005, people had high hopes for Magus. While he couldn't break the NN because the first member he could face that year was again Crono, that wasn't until round 4 of 6, and so Magus could, and was the favorite to win his division. He just had to beat Squall and Vincent. But before that, he had to face Knuckles in round 1. Nobody dreamed that Magus could lose. The most ardent Squall > Magus supporters wanted Knuckles to get like 45% at max. Then the poll opened... with Magus at 57% or so. This was already lower than most people's predictions, but Magus is a master of both the night vote and the board vote (the first 15 minutes or so), while Knuckles was the king of the day vote, so people were concerned, and rightly so. As time passed, Magus's percentage fell rapidly, while he increased his lead out to about 600... and then stopped. And it wasn't even morning. After morning, Knuckles began to come back. Magus held out for a couple hours, but then Knuckles just flat out dominated, took the lead, and explanded it to 2700. Magus tried a comeback at night, but the lead was simply too large, and Knuckles won by about 1700 votes.
That was a long digression, but the result of the match was that Magus went from the Contest Board's favorite character, the #1 near-elite, to the definition of overrated. On the Contest Board, in a tally of the board's brackets, there were 153 picks for Magus, 0 for Knuckles. That is the only match the Contest Board has ever been unanimously wrong on. Consequently there is much less motivation to nominate Magus. They'd rather nominate new characters than characters who have already been in 3 contests and whose strength they have lost faith in.
As far as Frog goes, he entered the 2004 contest with high hopes based on Crono and Magus's performances, and he very very very narrowly beat Liquid Snake and Master Chief before losing with over 48% to Solid Snake (who had a horrible picture next to Frog's awesome one). In 2005, he won with 51% against Riku from Kingdom Hearts before getting crushed 70-30 by Samus, revealing his true weakness that his match vs. Solid Snake had managed to mask. So there's not much enthusiasm for renominating him on the contest board either.
People would have thought there was a general Chrono decline in 2005, except that Crono performed just fine, excellent as usual, and getting to the main bracket finals, and that and other previous matches confirm that it was just Magus and Frog being extremely overrated.
So, basically, the conclusion of all this is that it is especially important that you nominate Magus, and also Frog.
