I find it very hard to understand why people need the game to force them to play ironman and can't force them on themselves should they wish to, and this is something I see mostly in Western RPG communities.
If you go to any Pokémon community, you'll see dozens of way people found to put different kind of restrictions upon themselves to make the game more challenging, from nuzlock to only playing with ditto. They set the rules for themselves and follow them, and share the experience with each other. Same with the fire emblem community.
The only reason some sort of iron man might be necessary is because of maybe multiplayer, but again if you set up the rules and play with someone that wants to play that way, I don't see why someone will break them if he does. Forcing the rules with game settings on someone who doesn't want to play that way doesn't seem productive.
