I play on console, I don’t use einherjars because I get enough mileage from the captured generics.
You get more than enough resources to skip out on one of them even if you lose a lot of units
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As I’ve pointed out above, there are different reasons people do ironmans. Not everyone is in it for the challenge. Some people just want to have a unique gameplay experience, where they end up being forced to use characters they otherwise wouldn’t and figure out how to adapt to unexpected losses. That’s not possible if the game difficulty is at a point where getting a few characters killed essentially loses you the game.
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I’ve never played any SRPG where losing someone is that detrimental. Obviously the main game over characters being the exception. Most SRPGs provide you with a large diverse cast of somewhere along 20 units or so with 12 deployed. Having 60+ doesn’t make it a unique experience, it devalues the characters. It also usually means most characters receive little to no story, or play little to no part in the actual events.
However having 20 characters as an example provides you with 8 potential loses without losing full deployment. That is fairly significant.
The whole point of any SRPG or RPG in general is the story and immersion. Adding to many junk characters to make it iron man friendly, can easily ruin that. And it doesn’t really make it friendly, it just gives you extra resources. You can do that with 3 lives for everyone. Or a number of other ways.
If you want an iron man experience without the challenge, just lower the difficulty instead of ruining the immersion of the story.
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Once again you’re projecting what you want out of an SRPG onto everyone else. Some people enjoy having a small tight cast that are all very involved in the main story. Other people like having lots of characters to pick from, and exploring all of their different interactions and supports. Other people aren’t playing for the story at all. I know people who usually skip the dialogue when playing hacks, because they’re here for the gameplay; it’s definitely not true that “the whole point of any SRPG … is the story and immersion”.
Also, a run is lost well before you lose “full deployment”, since units are not all interchangeable. For example, if you lose your only healer, you can’t just replace them with another fighter, you’re gonna have a bad time. Furthermore, if you lose a unit halfway through the game, you can’t realistically replace them with the unit that you benched 10 chapters ago, at this point their stats will be far too low to compete with the enemy. That’s why older FE games tend to keep offering you new units throughout the game so that you’ll always have a ready filler unit whose stats are on par with the enemies you’re currently fighting.
Adding lives to units would address the difficulty of ironmanning a game with a small cast, but it would lead to an ironman having much the same feel as a normal playthrough, since you’d likely end up with almost nobody permanently dying. It doesn’t really give you the ironman feeling of your mistakes having tangible consequences that you have to play past. It also means that replays of the game end up feeling more the same, since you don’t have much choice of what characters to use.
If you don’t like traditional “ironman-friendliness” that’s fine, there are lots of hack makers who feel the same way and design games where you aren’t supposed to get people killed (e.g. Krash’s hack, 4 Kings gives you full deployment for like 80% of the chapters, and it’s sequel, Deposition, gives you a game over if anyone dies). But understand that your preference is not the preference of everyone in the community. Not everyone plays SRPGs for the same reasons, and not everyone ironmans them for the same reasons.
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I think you’re the one projecting what you feel an SRPG should be on others. I simply stated my opinion on “iron man friendly” being an oxymoron. It’s just iron man easy mode.
I will never understand why someone would play an SRPG for the first time, and skip the story. Having a good story, with characters being involved in the story. Is what motivates people to play multiple times, and get those supports for the supporting cast they missed out on.
I’m not actually advocating for extra lives. But it is a better option than characters that have no involvement.
That’s not to say you can’t have 60+ characters, but you would need one hell of a story to support that cast.
I’ve always found SRPGs with excessive characters, to be lacking in the story and immersion.
People are welcome to play however they want, and whatever they want. Like you said, plenty of hack designers agree with my formula. And plenty agree with you. But Crash asked for people’s opinions, on the buzz word “iron man friendly” and I gave mine.
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There’s a significant difference for many people between a game that’s easy enough that you don’t get anyone killed when ironmanning and a game where you will likely get many people killed when ironmanning but still be able to beat the game. Most people who do ironmans prefer the 2nd, and therefore prefer a larger cast over just lowering the general difficulty, even though they both make ironmans easier. So I think that “iron man friendly” is a specific way of making the game easier to ironman, and it’s a way that many people who do ironmans tend to enjoy.
Having a good story is definitely not the only thing that motivates people to replay an SRPG. After all, one popular hack to ironman is Relic’s “Iron Emblem” where all of the characters are faceless generics with no dialogue at all. Many people enjoy FE primarily for the strategy/tactics aspect of it, and will replay a game because they enjoyed the way the maps were designed.
Sorry if I’ve come off as overly harsh or as disparaging you for sharing your opinion. I just took issue with the statement that “The entire point of an iron man is too see if you can complete the game with that imposed limitation”, since it read to me like you were saying that that’s the only valid reason to do an ironman. I think what you were actually saying is that that’s the entire reason that you do ironmans, which is totally fine.
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Except that is the entire point of an iron man. Sure some people may play that way to finish quicker, or to create a sense of realism. But that doesn’t change the fact that iron man was and is a challenge mode. It’s an option on some strategy games, such as X-Com. That’s not my opinion, it’s a fact. Iron man was designed as a challenge mode, same as the nuzlock challenge.
I don’t iron man anything myself, I feel like it’s an arbitrary challenge. I’m not interested in participating in challenge modes.
Edit: and it’s all good. I don’t take things personally. I feel like passionate discussion, helps the community grow. So it’s nice seeing your passion, even if we are on the opposite side.
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Except that Iron man isn’t really a self imposed challenge, unless you assume that the games were designed with the intention of using the hardware to circumnavigate the game design. And that certainly was not the original intention. Permadeath was a feature for a reason.
In the later games sure, the designers seem to have designed around resetting/using a turnwheel etc,
but this is not how Fire Emblem was originally meant to be played.
Therefore, I would argue that iron man is simply playing the game the way it was designed. (With the exception of some of the newer games.)
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Iron man is a self imposed challenge, it is not circumventing the game design. The games have always allowed you to restart a chapter, some even include battle saves of some kind. The game was always designed around restarting if things went too far south for you.
Permadeath is more about the characters being a resource, and creating a sense of realism. You don’t HAVE to restart, but then you are continuing without said resource. The same can be said about missing out on a key item.
Think of games like Shining Force that use casual mode. The only thing you have to do, is keep your main character alive. This greatly lowers the difficulty, because you can just throw people at tough enemies, consequences be damned. The only cost, is the gold to revive.
Iron manning harkens back to the arcade days. Where games were designed to drain your money. Console games for a good while were also designed to require full restarts. Limited lives in platformers and such. Games did eventually move away from this, and rougelikes became a thing, because people don’t want to replay the same game, but want that full stop lose.
This ‘to me at least’ means, that iron man’s are challenge modes at their core. So “iron man friendly” makes no sense as a term.
I don’t believe Kaga or IS designed any of their games to never be restarted, or to be iron manned. Playing past your mistakes, does not mean never restarting a chapter. It just means don’t obsess over playing perfectly.
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I don’t personally ironman the whole game as a challenge but I occasionally don’t reset if the chapter I beat was too tedious for me to play again.
Making hacks ironman friendly is a nice thing especially dieing to low percentage crits or ambush spawns isn’t fun but Ig you can always include casual mode as an option and ignore making it ironman friendly.
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In the GBA titles you can simply suspend and restart the chapter, it’s not a “Hardware exploit” to reset a chapter.
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Personally I believe ironmanning, or permadeath as a whole, is a vital part of what makes the FE game engine unique. Thanks to the permadeath/emergent narrative system, even the most bare-bones written characters can still feel like they are memorable or significant to the story. In this light I believe FE characters do not necessarily need to be well-written to be memorable; this is something I view as a direct result of ironman friendliness, and it’s also one of FE’s most unique and distinctive traits imo. Some of my most vivid memories from all the FE games I’ve played are primarily thanks to ironmanning.
That said, I wouldn’t ever consider ironmanning hacks on my first run, mainly out of fear of missing valuable story content. I’m much more open to ironmanning in subsequent runs though, after I’ve already read all the story, so I guess in that light I’m more inclined to try ironmanning hacks that I liked enough to play multiple times.
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If these games were designed to be quarter eaters like arcade machines, there would be ambush spawn ballistae, statuses that never wear off, and everything has the possibility to miss.
wait a second
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“Yes i Ironman pretty much all the time”
I used to play with resets a lot as a kid, until i got so tired of restarting that i took a huge break from FE for a while. After i got back in i started Ironmanning pretty much everything, often blind, and now i’m at a point where its hard to not ironman. First one was Shadow Dragon, then i did and failed Path of Radiance, then i did Awakening on hard ironman blindly, and managed to beat it first try. Conquest blind hard ironman made me reset like 5 times to get past the first few chapters, but it was huge fun. Afterwards i did FE8, which i lost due to accidentally hitting talk with Tana and thus being unable to rescue Eirika.
All in all Ironmanning all these games made me realise just how useable some seemingly bad units are, and how sometimes you only understand the game designers intention behind a character during an Ironman. Shadow Dragon is the best example of this, Darros sucks at a first look, but make him an armour knight and he will have an insane 60% DEF growth, higher than any other regular unit, General promo gains are also massive, even if he gets DEF screwed, like mine did at -3, he is still insanely useful, basically like Sedgar but without speed. Roshea is another great example, sucks at first, but he can get to C lances relatively quickly, and has enough base SPD to not get doubled by most enemies till lategame. Vyland has a pretty good speed growth, and the 2 times i used him he turned into one of my best units, in one of those he was leveled as a curate from level 1 to 20 because i needed another staff user, and then had all my other staff users die, so i needed him for Physic/Warp
The point I’m trying to make is that you would never notice these things in a reset playthrough, and just stack your EXP on the 15 units or so you wanna use. Not only does an ironman diversify your playthrough by making you consider new units and strategies you would normally never even think about, it also makes for a much more exciting and challenging playthrough that has the side effect of making you much better at playing and understanding the game.
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im not ironmanning if the creator (you thats you krash i mean you) tells me not to
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Since my thoughts on this take have somewhat changed while still being the same I’d figure i’d give my revised opinion.
Once Gaiden came into existence the idea of the ironman focus was lost due largely to the split parties and dual narrative focus. FE3 went back to that idea however once Genealogy released the whole idea of ironman runs was kind of thrown away largely due to how recruitments and requirements was handled and hasn’t changed since.
Ironically Shadow Dragon is the only game that realistically handled war time deployment due to giving the player replacement generics if enough units die.
Fire Emblem itself has never actually handled the idea of “war is bad” very well due to the player always being in control of a platoon that functions as an elite strike force rather then the whole force of the army.
Even the hack Iron Emblem doesn’t actually handle this much better since even grunts would mourn the loss of their field commander. So while it does give you plenty of unita to work with it doesn’t particularly handle how a platoon style narrative works all that well.
My personal views on ironman runs has always been that they were unnecessary. Largely due to only Shadow Dragon actually being designed that way intentionally. However i do understand how some people prefer to play that way and don’t judge them for it, so i’d appreciate not getting flak for not playing that way myself.
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That is not true at all.
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Based Donlot.
Like he said Iron Mannig is what allows players to diversify and adapt to what happens in FE.
Oh you made a bad play and Got X unit Killed, too bad you cannot reset you have to live with your mistake and adapt by getting another unit and maybe changing your strategy.
Oh Y unit died to a 2% crit? That’s sad and all but now you have to once again adapt.
Our Sniper Wendell died to a 2% crit and due to that we had to use new units instead that we wouldn’t have used otherwise.
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Except there isn’t much to adapt, largely due to how each game is structured sometimes you can’t just live with a BS RNG roll screwing you.
Some prime examples are:
- Anyone in FE6 dying with a Divine Weapon on them.
2.Somehow getting Arden killed before chapter 2 and losing the pursuit ring as a result.
3.Getting the Silver Swordmaster on a low bet in any GBA arena when you first enter it.
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Ambush spawned by like 10 dudes on any gaiden themed map.
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Siege Crit by just about anything on a FoW map.
These are just a few of the ways some games/hacks can be downright irritating to ironman. Yet very few Ironman a game/hack on their first time playing it and only do so once they know enough about it to try such a thing.
The simplest way i can put it is as thus " you can’t adapt to bullshit".
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I actually went iron man when playing my very first FE game, FE7. I made a lot of dumb decisions but managed to beat it (thank you so much for existing, Athos)