Permanently Missable Content / Turn-Based Strategy

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• In Advance Wars 2 and Advance Wars Dual Strike, certain levels have cities that, when captured, unlock a bonus mission. If you clear said certain levels without capturing said certain cities, the bonus mission — and the prize for completing it — is permanently missable...until your next playthrough at least. While the game hints at which levels have these cities, you don't know which city out of several is the one you need to capture. Although... it's up to the player whether or not the prize for completing the bonus missions (The ability to deploy Neotanks in 2, or Black Boats, Black Bombs, and Piperunners in DS) is actually worth the work, especially considering finding the map unlocks a brutally difficult extra mission that you are now forced to complete...
• They pop up on occasion in Battle for Wesnoth. Capturing certain villages or visiting certain areas in campaign mode will give you free units which usually have no upkeep cost. These can be very useful in some campaigns. On a couple of occasions (the three Heavy Infantry and Burin from the Rise of Wesnoth), missing them renders the whole campaign basically Unwinnable.
• Some of the dungeons in Eternal Eyes cannot be accessed after you defeat their respective bosses. While in some cases this doesn't seem so bad, some of those dungeons contain randomly dropped equipment that you might want. In particular, Villee Fort (which gets replaced in the tenth and final chapter) has the excellent Ninja Suit in it, which is one of the few equipment that can increase your Movement Points and let you travel farther.
• In Final Fantasy Tactics Advance the morpher class requires captured monsters to learn skills from. The goblin and thunder drake monsters become permanently missable if not captured early on as they only appear in non-random storyline missions and so become "extinct" after those missions are completed.
  • Doesn't help that they're two permanently missables in one — not only do they need to be captured so that Morphers can become them, but they also teach Blue Mage abilities — and they can't be learned from Morphers.
  • Thanks to the limit of holding only 64 mission items, it is possible to keep throwing away extra mission items when you are full (most of them you can get again and again) and wind up accidentally tossing away an item that cannot be obtained again. What's that? Two missions need Black Thread and you tossed one of the two away? Can't complete all 300 missions and can't recruit Cid. Oops!
  • Thanks to enemy thieves, mog knights, and snipers, you could potentially lose some of your exclusive equipment forever due to it being broken or stolen. The purple turtle enemies also had the ability to break your equipment by eating it.
• Final Fantasy Tactics generally averts this trope, since many unique weapons and items that appear early on in the game can be acquired later through poaching, or by catching thrown items. However, there are items that can only be obtained by having a character with the Move-Find item skill land on a certain space. Depending on your character's Bravery level you may either find a rare item or a common item. Since an item can only be searched for once, finding the wrong item in battle may result in the item becoming permanently missable. Also, since some maps can not be revisited, you may have the chance to miss the item altogether.
  • One of these in particular is a Guide Dang It!. The Escutcheon II is a super version of the first shield you can purchase. However, in addition to only being available on one map, on top of a pillar which can only be accessed in a particular manner. The character with Move-Find Item, must have a sufficiently high jump stat, and bounce off of a large creature, such as one of the cats or a dragon.
  • If Mustadio dies or you kick him out of your party, then not only will you lose him and his unique skills, but a long chain of side missions in Chapter 4 become completely unavailable to you. This means that you won't be able to recruit four secret characters, including Beowulf, Reis, Worker 8, and Cloud Strife. Oh, and the aforementioned Escutcheon II is forever barred from you since that fight is part of the quest chain.
  • Marquis Elmdore wears a full suit of unique Genji armor as well as the Masamune, the second most powerful katana in the game, in the second fight against him. If you don't steal the items from him before draining most of his health, then you'll never be able to get them.
  • There are a couple of spells, namely Ultima and Zodiark, that can only be learned when an eligible character (Ramza in his default Squire class and any Summoner respectively) survives getting hit by them. The problem is that there are precious few battles where either spell is used (in fact, Zodiark is only used in one optional fight), and if you complete all those battles without learning them in time, then those spells are gone forever.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Since you cannot replay missions in the series, this goes for everything and almost everyone that is not automatically given to you. Often in ways of Guide Dang It!. Watch out for items hidden in deserts or for chests in stages with enemy thieves.
  • Other and Partner units can kill enemies that drop items like keys, weapons, or even skill scrolls. Instead of going to you, the items are simply gone.
  • In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, not pairing up the 'right' people (Brigid with anyone, Claude with Erinys or Silvia, and Lewyn with Erinys, Silvia, or Tailtiu) in the first half of the game can result in certain weapons (Yewfelle, Valkyrie, and Forseti respectively) becoming unusable or downright lost.
  • There are only four characters over the course of the series (discounting Three Houses, which has an entirely different system of recruitment) whom you have more than one chance to recruit. You have two chances each to recruit Rickard from Fire Emblem: Mystery of the Emblem and its remake, Perceval from Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, and Amelia from Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. Cath from The Binding Blade will appear in every indoors map until you recruit her, but Roy must talk to her over three chapters out of six for that to happen, so if you avoid talking to her for whatever reason in too many of the maps, you can still miss her.
  • In Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, you only get the second chance at Amelia on Eirika's route, and only if you didn't kill her on the first attempt. If you are playing Ephraim's route and fail to recruit her or kill her the first time she appears on Eirika's route, you lose all chances at recruiting her.
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening:
    • Children characters (except Lucina) are recruited through Paralogues. In order to unlock them, you must get the mothers married, but because Sumia has very few potential husbands (Chrom, Male Avatar, Frederick, Gaius, and Henry), it's easy to miss out on Cynthia.
    • A bunch of characters are only optional recruits, and in several cases, it's possible to accidentally kill them instead of recruiting them. Still others have certain requirements that must be fulfilled in their respective recruitment chapters before they join the main party.
    • Walhart can be particularly easy to accidentally miss, since he specifically needs to fight Chrom at some point during the chapter. Someone else defeated him before Chrom could get there? Too bad, buddy; restart the mission or don't get Walhart in your army!
    • Yen'fay can also only be recruited if you talk to him with Say'ri. It's simple enough to deploy Say'ri on the map, but as he's the only character in the game who can't be recruited with Chrom, he's fairly easy to miss.
  • Fire Emblem Fates also has a couple of instances of child characters becoming permanently missable.
    • First, if playing as a male Corrin and marrying anyone besides Flora, Reina, Scarlet, Anna, or a second-generation character, one of the other men will lose out on a potential wife, and therefore their child will not be available.
    • There's one odd instance of this potentially happening even if the father is married. In Birthright Chapter 15, Kaze can suffer a Plotline Death if he does not have at least an A-Support with Corrin, and his child will be rendered lost if this happens.
    • And, finally, should you go for either of the bi options for Corrin, you'll lose Kana (regardless) and possibly Nina (if a male Corrin marries Niles).
    • Two non-child examples are Benny and Charlotte in Revelation. Most of the units in Fates who aren't automatically handed to you are either recruitable with Corrin or will still join as long they survived the chapter. Not so with these two, who must be spoken to with Elise, and won't join at all if she didn't get to them. If Elise is killed in the battle, then Benny and Charlotte can't be recruited.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
    • You pick one of the titular houses to teach at the beginning of the game, with each one having its own set of students for units. Most students from the other houses can be swayed into switching with proper stat/support raising, letting you use them as units. However, you only have the first 12 chapters, the span of an in-game year, to get the units you want from the other two houses, because a Time Skip occurs after that point and renders anyone not recruited before then inaccessible (and most likely causes them to become an enemy unit in the second half of the game). The time-based progression of the game means that recruiting a large amount of students requires either a New Game Plus or lots of time dedicated to raising supports over other important activities.
    • There are also many cases in which, if you don't get a C support with Byleth and other characters prior to the Time Skip, you will be told that you missed the opportunity to deepen the bond once you get enough support points to go up to C rank, thus rendering the support inaccessible for the rest of the playthrough.
    • There are a handful of other supports that must be obtained before certain chapters (such as Petra and Ferdinand's A-support), and not getting them in time will lock you out of the conversations until your next playthrough.
    • Most of the time, classing up requires a seal item corresponding to the class's rank, and seals can be bought frequently. However, the Dark Mage class can only be gotten by using a special Dark Seal, and it needs another Dark Seal to upgrade into the Dark Bishop. Dark Seals are only found as held items of the Death Knight, a very powerful enemy unit who appears in a few storyline battles. It's hard to beat him or steal his item without specific strategies, but missing out more than a few times renders it impossible to make a unit into a Dark Mage/Bishop. It's especially nasty on the Black Eagles route, since you only get three chances to get Dark Seals if you take the Crimson Flower branch, and those three chances are during Part 1, when the Death Knight is at his deadliest.
    • There's only one way to grant a unit the Dancer class, which is by having them win a competition held late in the first part of the game. Only one unit can be sent to compete, and if they don't have enough Charm to win, then the Dancer class is missed on that playthrough. And even if they do win, you'd better hope that unit doesn't decide to leave later on.
• One of the most insidious permanently missable items is the Snakish sword in Phantom Brave. It can only be accessed once: during the tutorial. And, thanks to the game system, you can't just pick it up and leave with it. You have to confine a spirit to it and wait until the spirit is removed from the board, and even then you're not guaranteed to get it. There is a more sure-fire way to get it, but it's by getting a hidden character, and the opportunity to get that character is all but impossible after that section, making that a permanently missable too.
• The same thing is true of the old Genesis Shining Force games, including one character that you have to speak to over several acts, who never says anything back. However, these characters are not necessary for the overall story or endings, but the characters you could prospectively lose include Joke Character, a defied examplle of Squishy Wizard, the game's best Tank and the two best characters in the game, who are difficult to find without the help of a strategy guide
  • Another batch of potential things to Lose Forever was introduced in the GBA remake...cards. Some cards are tucked away in inconspicuous places; Anri's is in a bookcase, and most bookcases in the game simply call up useless flavor text when examined. Others, however, are nicknamed "Friendship Cards" in that you have to build rapport with certain party members to get them. How do you build this rapport? Simple: bring the character in question with you into battle and make sure they never get KO'd; this unlocks more and more of their monologues in headquarters between missions, and eventually they say something to the effect of "take this; we're friends" and reward you with their card.
  • Certain enemies have to be finished off by certain characters. A particularly Egregrious example is Balzack, who has to be defeated by a knight named Earnest (who, it should be noted, you just recieved prior to the Balzack battle. Granted, this makes sense, since Earnest exists to Wangst over his beef with Balzack; on the other hand, the mission immediately before that asks you to eliminate a random Hellhound with Guntz.
  • Several of the best (or coolest) characters (and one Joke Character) could be missed without ever being seen if you took the direct route over the scenic route. These included the Ninja, Samurai, magic-wielding centaur, healer/monk, mutant egg creature, and a hamster.
• Star Control 2 is full of these. One of the most effective ships in the game is piloted by a race of abject cowards and if you fail to get a supply of them immediately when able, they all disappear under a force shield. Unfortunate and irreversible stuff keeps happening as time goes by and ultimately, if you don't get things done, the Kohr-Ah will genocide every sentient race in the game one by one.
• In every game of the Suikoden series, while most of the 108 recruitable characters either join automatically over the course of the story or can be recruited at any time, some have limited windows of opportunity, after which they're permanently missable. Since recruiting all of them is required to get the best ending, and on top of that these characters tend to be very easy to miss, the result is the definition of a Guide Dang It! situation.
  • One particular example in Suikoden II is the Clive subquest. He's chasing after a woman. Easy enough, let's help him out. If your total play time is too high, then he loses the trail and will never find it again, giving him the "bad" ending for his character (he chases her for the rest of his life). The problem with this is two fold: first, there's no indication that this will happen at any point, meaning if you lose the trail, you'll have no idea why without a guide. Second, in order to fully complete his quest, you have to reach the last possible village in the game (which is, itself, optional) in less than twenty hours play time (not the easiest accomplishment even if you know from the start to try for it). For most gamers without a specific guide for recruiting characters and level building, this is all but impossible. Thus, most players either don't bother with Clive's subquest (as it's immaterial to whether you get the best ending for the game as a whole), or they cheat.
• Super Robot Wars loves this trope. Every secret in the game is missable, and you aren't ever really told about them... however, most of them are logical and there aren't a lot of variations on how to get secrets, so it usually becomes a matter of trial and error. Also, in the games with Skill Points, it generally becomes a matter of having really high or really low Skill Points.
• In Super Robot Wars Alpha Gaiden, fans had to choose between keeping Getter Robo G or Shin Getter Robo once Shin Getter appeared (In Alpha, Mazinger Z was like this instead, but in that case keeping the original is harder than getting the upgrade -- of course, with the power up Powered Mazinger Z gets, you won't WANT to upgrade), Impact forced you to choose between Shin Getter Robo and normal Weissritter with the Rampage Ghost or Getter Robo G and Rein Weissritter (it was also possible to get NEITHER of them) and in Compact 3, you either got Getter G and Kouchi Oni early or Shin Getter and Tekkoki Oni later.
• In Valkyria Chronicles, you can get special weapons by killing enemy aces. Each ace only appears in one specific battle, and some of them don't even do anything to draw attention to the fact that they're there at all (The first one in the game is in an alley on the opposite corner of the battlefield from most of the playable units, and stays there the entire battle, making it highly unlikely that a player who doesn't know to look for him will find him, since he appears in a defensive battle). Since plot-related battles cannot be replayed until New Game Plus, it is easy for them (And their special equipment) to be permanently missable.
• Valkyria Chronicles 4 averts this with its Squad Stories, personal missions starring three party members each. Obviously, if a squad member is Killed Off for Real before you complete their Squad Story, said Story is inaccessible. However, you unlock the option to resurrect fallen characters after beating the game, meaning no Squad Story can be permanently missed. This is particularly useful for the squad member who suffers a Plotline Death in Chapter 16.
• In Warhammer 40,000: Rites of War, it is possible to find valuable artifacts or other war-gear on the various scenario maps of the campaign. But if you complete a scenario without first finding all the available wargear (and there are scenarios where, given the limited number of turns you have to finish, you simply will not be able to look everywhere), that artifact or piece of gear is permanently missable.
• In both versions of Yggdra Union, every item save for starting equipment is missable. Everything requires you to have done a lot of searching and hope that you can find something before you run out of turns. To top it off certain items can only be acquired through various means. Many items require you to have fought and killed them with higher luck, others require you to steal it (your luck should not be high enough to force a drop), others still require you to have done something in previous maps and the oh so impossible to find Fanelia weapon which requires you to have acquired the Hyper drill by collecting 7 hard to find duds (and in the process missing out on certain equipment in the old game unless you saved and reloaded) and stepped on a space 3 times to having to kill an enemy with a specific card ability. And in order to even equip Hyper drill(a requirement to get fanelia), Durant must be at the max level in the game(not an easy thing to do)
• After you beat Yu-Gi-Oh! Monster Capsule GB, you can't fight Weevil, Bonz, or Mako again, or go into the RPG Worlds. It's also possible to fail rescuing Yugi's friends, rendering them unavailable as figurines, and if this happens you're unable to get Yugi or Yami Yugi as figurines.

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