Hey everyone, Conash here! Sorry for the delay on the blog post, I’ve been taking the past few days to rest now that Iron Waifu has past. It ended up just slipping my mind that I should talk about how things went. Sorry about that!
I first wanted to take a moment to thank everyone on staff for helping out with the tournament. It was a lot to cover and I know that I couldn’t have gotten by without the help and support from all of those involved ranging from the more apparent things like Omni’s constant vigilance against cheaters to the more background jobs like Romeo taking basically all of the image duties for the entirety of the month. Being able to lean on Nekochan and Moomabelle to help handle the blog posts was also a huge help and while it was an immense help, though I wouldn’t hold my breathe for weekly blog posts given how quickly those can burn people out. I think that we’ll try to have more regular blog posts again but we’ll see how things will go.
Now as for the tournament itself, this was my first time being the driving force for any sort of event like this and all things considered I’m very happy with how things turned out! While the absence of NoMoshing’s creative touch was felt at least by me, a big reason why me and Romeo tried to lean so heavily on last year’s format and quips. It was definitely a new experience having to get the word out and organizing things with people. Still, it was great seeing both a lot of returning and new faces around for this years tournaments, which certainly had it’s own fill of excitement and twists all throughout! Getting to be there and doing what I could to give you all as great of a time with Iron Waifu made it all worth it!
Personally though, I was really happy to see Brigandine win this year. See, I’m not sure how many of you were there back during the original Iron Waifu 2016, but back then I was basically the face of the Brigandine fanbase. I wasn’t part of the team yet and had recently done a screenshot Let’s Play of Harem Collector where she just really clicked with me immensely, she scratched an itch that I had felt was sorely missing in the game. So come the first ever Iron Waifu tournament I did as much campaigning as I could to try to help push her as far as she would go. Now, I know that people voting for her both back then and now are doing so because of their own reasons, but as the biggest vocal fan of hers at the time I was shocked to see her do better against Therese in that tournament then any of the other girls, including her finals match against Alina. A lot of people slept on her but I was hopeful that she had a powerful following behind her, which 2017 proved to be the case. From there she kept coming so close to winning every year, but she was always a strong contender every year. So it just made me happy to see that my favorite girl, who I fought so hard to build good will for back when I was just a fan finally get a victory. I know that a lot of you out there have your reasons for disliking Brigandine, including just not getting her or feeling like her presence “stole” any hopes for your favorite girl to win, and I can certainly get that. This year’s tournament, while it certainly took a lot out of me did not leave me blind to how I noticed that this year especially has had a bit more of a sombre vibe to it, which is something that I’m hoping we’ll be able to address a bit more in future years.
Speaking of future years, I wanted to take a second to talk a bit about next year’s Iron Waifu. There is still a lot that we will be figuring out over the next year, but there are a few things that I can clear up. First of all, this year was the final ‘Iron Waifu’ tournament for Harem Collector 1. While we’ve had a lot of fun with the tournaments here and there’s still plenty more for that could be done with the girls here, we want to pivot towards our next project “I Live To Serve Dungeon King!!” for next year, and at this point we feel that Harem Collector 1 has had a good six years of Iron Waifu. This isn’t to say that your Waifu won’t ever be able to be crowned Iron Waifu though, as when we get around to Harem Collector 2 and future games in the franchise, your favorite HC girls will be looking to get their shot for the crown once again! That said, we probably won’t be sticking to the same format that we’ve used for previous years for Iron Waifu 2022, while we’ve got some ideas in the works trying to fill out a roster for a full 32 characters would probably run into issues similar to what Iron Waifu 2016 had. Just know that we’re looking over everyone’s feedback and thoughts over the prior few years and will be using this shift in game to try to improve the format of Iron Waifu as a whole!
That’s about it from me. Looking forward to an announcement from NoMoshing himself in the next couple of weeks, while we’re still ironing out some of the finer pointsit looks to me that we’ll be taking Bad Kitty Games in a better direction overall.