I enjoy playing most video games blind, which extends to rom hacks. I don’t ironman for the difficulty, I do it because it’s more fun to just play the game and see what happens rather than reset every time someone dies and play every chapter a million times (because I’m not a great FE player)
2 Likes
I’m the type of person who would reset 20 times for a good turn one so no.
2 Likes
I generally don’t Ironman on my first playthrough on any given game, but from my second playthrough onward I do actually play that way, with a few exceptions (particularly, I don’t like Ironman in Three Houses because I don’t like to recruit students from other houses and with a meager roster of 9-12 units… yeah, Ironman runs are pretty much a chore). If I were to make a ROM hack though I’d definitely take Ironman runs into account, and I would actually encourage players to play that way because it is actually super fun and engaging.
1 Like
A big part of it is if the player sees ironman as the way to play the game, or as a challenge run. Ironman in FE definitely wasn’t meant to be a challenge run at first, but with many of the recent FEs it has shifted towards a ridiculous way to play the game.
Another thing is that you don’t need to restart the whole game on a game over. The point is to play past your deaths, resulting in a unique experience from other players and your previous runs. There’s no way you’re going to use myrmidon #3 who joins in ch12 if you’re resetting to keep everyone alive.
4 Likes
I wouldn’t want to do a hard ironman because some units aren’t as interchangeable as others. Most games have at least two early game healers but not all do. Playing earlygame FE9 (which is probably the most challenging part of the game) without Rhys or FE10 without Laura sounds incredibly tedious. While you can get by subbing in one melee fighter for another, being without a healer can pretty much ruin the flow of the game because of all the time spent using items.
Early game mages also tend to far outdamage most other units, especially against bosses (before FE7 started the trend of inflated boss RES). FE3 in particular feels like it has early game sections that are designed to be tackled by Linde’s Aura and playing on without her would turn some bosses into a significant struggle. So maybe it works better in the DS games when you can force almost anyone to be a healer or a mage if you really have to, but some units have too unique of a function for me to agree that you can always just refill your ranks with other units.
1 Like
I think you bring up a really good point Scuba, which is that players can do ironman runs with very different motivations. Different types of games cater to different types of ironmans.
I think there are at least 3 common motivations for ironmans that have been brought up here:
- Ironman as a way of getting a unique experience (different from other players and previous runs).
- Ironman as a challenge run (test your skills at the game by beating it with an additional restriction)
- Ironman as a way to beat games more quickly (I can’t be bothered to reset this until everyone lives)
I play ironmans primarily for reason 2 (challenge). I often like to combine them with other challenge runs, like increased hard mode bonuses for enemies or using a restricted set of characters as a way of proving to myself and others that the challenge can be beaten reliably (since a lot of ridiculous challenges can be beaten with a very tedious amount of resetting/rigging).
From this perspective, the most important quality for an “ironmannable” game to have is reliability. Having replacement units is one way to provide reliability, since they allow you to have a chapter which is difficult enough that there’s no way to avoid giving someone a death chance if your unlucky, and then make up for it by providing a surplus of units. But having irreplaceable units is also okay. If a certain unit is necessary for a later chapter (to recruit someone, or to kill a boss, or to get a gaiden chapter) then part of the challenge just becomes finding a way to protect them from any chance of death, just like you do to your lord. Similarly, transparency is always nice, but when I’m planning out a challenge run of a game/hack, I’m generally planning out the run and advance and looking at chapters in FEBuilder anyway, so it’s not that big a deal. The the that makes a challenge run bad/frustrating for me is when I lose it due to something out of my control. If I lose because I made a mistake then that’s on me and I’ll just restart the run and try to do better.
My impression is that Pandan plays ironmans primarily for reason 1 (unique experience). From this perspective, allowing the player to play past mistakes/deaths is the most important thing for “ironmannability”, since the thing that makes your run distinct form other peoples’ is your mistakes/deaths and the way you compensate for them. Reliability is still important, but tends to come somewhat for free if the game’s difficulty is in a place where the player can lose multiple important characters and still be fine. Transparency is again always nice to have, but a lack of transparency doesn’t necessarily hurt the objective of “unique gameplay experience”, as long as the poorly explained thing isn’t leading to a gameover. For example, some of my most memorable FE experiences come from ironmanning FE6 NM mostly blind, and having to adapt on the fly to deal with unexpected reinforcements and the deaths they sometimes caused (FE6 NM is much better for this than HM, since Roy is a lot less likely to get killed by the surprise reinforcements).
For a person who just wants to get through the game and doesn’t want to have to reset chapters unless it’s absolutely necessary (which is sometimes me plaything through a hack 
) the most important thing is probably transparency. You don’t want to have to waste your time prepared for surprises that might come or reinforcements that might show up, so each chapters should be clear about the win and loss conditions and any changes that are going to come midway through. If your goal is just to get through the game quickly and easy, strict adherence to the ironman rules is probably not as important, and you may allow resets for situations where you lose due to factors outside your control or if you lose a character whose loss you doubt you can play through. Reliability and ability to play through mistakes are still important form this perspective, though.
Which motivation you have for ironmanning affects which games are good for ironmans. FE7 is not great as a “challenge” ironman, since when you turn the difficulty up high it’s relatively easy to lose to factors outside of your control. As Pandan points out, however, FE7 works well for “unique experience” ironmans, since you can get any non-lord killed and get by just fine with the other units the game provides.
FE6, on the other hand, is not as good for a “unique experience” ironman, since a bunch of characters have to stay alive for gaiden chapters, and certain parts of the game skyrocket in difficulty if you lose a key unit to a poorly advertised ambush spawn (e.g. if Marcus dies to Rutger in Ch4, you’re gonna have a bad time). FE6 is pretty good for a “challenge” ironman, however. All of the maps are seize, and they’re large and open enough to give you ample space to retreat and regroup if you have an unfortunate series of misses (as long as you planned ahead for what you’d do if you missed). All of the gaiden required characters can be kept safe very reliably, and trying to protect all of them provides an interesting extra challenge if the run is going pretty well (if people are dying left and right, the challenge becomes beating Zephiel, b/c that’s gonna be hard enough). While some of the “replacement units” are not going to be able to fill in very well when the difficulty is turned up high (looking at you Ogier), you do get a solid supply of prepromotes throughout the game, which means that you can reliably beat the game even if your growth units get stat-screwed. Thus, if you know what you’re doing, you can beat the game with >99% reliability, but doing so is fairly challenging, and you can’t afford as many mistakes as you can in FE7.
5 Likes
I never ironman just because I don’t inherently like the idea of self imposed challenges designed to give myself a headache.
1 Like
Sorry for being off topic but i was wondering what’s the most iron man friendly game (fe or otherwise) y’all have played.
For me its tactics ogre on the psp: Every character has 3 deaths before permadeath kicks in, there are technically infinite (weaker) generics, you level up classes instead of characters, so if you have a lvl11 archer you can change anyone into a lvl11 archer for example, and when a unit dies they can pass on some of their skills to another ally.
Iron man? Why would my characters ever die in the first place?
1 Like
I’d definitely say shadow dragon is the most ironman friendly game imo, the game is pretty much built around you swapping out characters and you get both gaidens and generics if enough units die, this all makes fe11 one of the few games I would ever try to ironman alone, although I will say Caeda having so many characters to recruit makes me want to put a big asterisk next to my statement…
1 Like
You don’t need any of the units Caeda recruits.
yes you don’t need them but caeda recruiting so many characters distinctly puts more value on her life which makes her death not only increase the difficulty by forcing you to use weaker units and it can feel very unfair to some.
I Don’t do Iron Man run on my first playthrough, I get to let all my units live in the final boss.
Then, after the ending and getting the support ending that I want with all the character, then I do a Ironman run.
But Blazing Blade is of limits for me. The story too great to do a Ironman run. Or I’m just too scared to Ironman Blazing Sword.
1 Like
I feel like “iron-man friendly” is an oxymoron. The entire point of an iron man is too see if you can complete the game with that imposed limitation. So making it friendly removes the entire point of the challenge.
To be ironman friendly means that the game has a large, diverse cast. Look at older games giving you 60+ units because ironman was the expected playstyle, versus something like Fates or Three Houses which give half that because you’re meant to reset (or in Three Houses’ case, you’re meant to use divine pulse)
1 Like
excuse me? Excuse me but I wouldn’t ever consider Fates to be ironman unfriendly, you’re given a sizable cast in both games (I don’t think we need to argue the ironman friendliness of Rev), access to capturing/kidnapping to recruit generic units, Amiibo units, child units, and einherjars, there is no way that you can run out of units if you use these tools, the einherjar shop even can give you a copy of some units.
2 Likes
Oh yeah, the Ironman friendliness of Rev, where half, if not more than half of the units you get are garbage and are only useful if you allow yourself to grind the hell out of skirmishes.
2 Likes
you still get many units, no matter how bad they are, most will still be useful, and you’re still leaving out the einherjar copy units, child units that start with a special seal that catches them up to your unit’s level after a certain chapter, and capturable enemy units with Niles and Orochi.
Also invasions aren’t grinding, they are optional extra challenges, you can’t repeatedly do them so those are still a thing.
2 Likes
Do you actually play on console and wait out for junk like capture units and pay of einherjars upfront? Or do you just hack in the resources for everything else?
I understand what is meant by iron man friendly. Like I said, it’s an oxymoron. Having a large diverse cast of 60+ makes ironmaning easier, and thus removes the challenge. It’s not Iron man friendly, it’s iron man easy mode.
1 Like