A new version of the popular Ironmon challenge, dubbed "Super Kaizo", debuts on Twitch streamer and Ironmon creator iateyourpie's channel

iateyourpie returned on Monday March 18th, 2024 with the latest incarnation of his Ironmon challenge run series, with his first stream of Super Kaizo Ironmon peaking at over 5000 viewers. Ironmon has been a popular challenge run for streamers since its conception in 2020, particularly the Kaizo ruleset. It can be described as a cross between a randomizer and a permadeath challenge, wherein Pokémon that have fainted can no longer be used, with many additional rules and restrictions tacked on to make it even more difficult for the sake of difficulty and entertainment to stream viewers. Ironmon challenges are not related to the Nuzlocke challenge.

Aside from the unpopular Survival variation and some conceived by others such as Kaizo Plus, each variant of Ironmon was created after iateyourpie completed a single run of the previous ruleset on FireRed; his preferred game for the challenge and what Super Kaizo is specifically designed for. However, Ironmon runs can and have been done on any main series game. A specialized tracking program has been created for this challenge, together with a dedicated Discord server with over 64000 members. Ironmon has even been granted its own tag on Twitch.

To give an idea of the difficulty of an Ironmon run, it took a streamer known as Smallant 1786 attempts to complete the Kaizo variation on FireRed, which made the news in several outlets. Pie took two years and 7788 attempts to beat Kaizo Ironmon himself; although it should be noted that this is something of an outlier result among the community. Even among those who have managed multiple completions of the same or multiple games, victory is very hard to achieve.

As of writing, this new ruleset, among other things, improves the AI of all trainers and gives their Pokémon held items, bans the Battle Armor and Shield Dust abilities for removing luck factors, bans non-defensive X-items, bans stat increasing moves on Gym Leaders and Elite Four and gives them all six Pokémon each, and forces the player to change their Pokémon in the Safari Zone. All previous rules from the Kaizo ruleset apply, such as starting over on a wipe, random starter choice, increased enemy Trainer levels, using one Pokémon at all times, heavily restricting held items, and banning shopping for anything except Balls and Repels, using potions outside of battle, and recovery moves in battle. For the full list of "official" rules, refer to the information on Pastebin and Github, however please note that much like Super Kaizo, these rulesets were originally made with FireRed/LeafGreen in mind; tweaks and adjustments have been made by the community for other games.

Caleb "iateyourpie" Bloomer, also known as simply Pie, is a popular Twitch streamer who for the past several years has had a focus on ironman-style runs of video games, requiring them to restart the entire game over if a challenge condition is failed. Ironmon has been his biggest and most popular creation. Besides Super Kaizo Ironmon, his current project is what he has called the 602 Godrun, involving completing runs of four different 3D Mario games back to back without dying or taking damage (except from water in 64). He has so far managed an individual run of Super Mario 64 under these conditions. He previously performed what he called the Year of Challenges, which lasted several years and involved many similar challenges. He pledged to donate $1000 to the charity Action Against Hunger for every challenge he completed, and $100 for every challenge he did not.

Pie and other people will likely be tackling the Super Kaizo challenge over the next few weeks, so be sure to check into his stream and others on Twitch to watch the challenge unfold.