I don't try to do anything out of the ordinary usually, but when I do, I do it because I want to be a weird hipster about it. The only couple instances where I've done such a thing that I can think of at the moment are Castlevania Portrait of Ruin, competitive Pokemon, and Kancolle.
I've completed a mostly Charlotte run of Portrait of Ruin because of the guides I've looked up for it favoring Jonathan over Charlotte. It turned out to make the game much more manageable, bar her lack of super jump and jump kicks (*grumble, grumble*). But it also meant that I had to make some of my own strategies which was actually really fun to do.
Kancolle and competitive Pokemon are relatively the same. Any time there's an event in Kancolle, I always have to forbid something in said event, usually Tone-class Kai Nis and torpedo cruisers, sometimes night battle cut ins. For the uninitiated, torpedo cruisers are akin to using Uber tier Pokemon, Tone-class are highly recommended for whatever reason even though they're almost the same as their cheaper variants, and night battle cut ins... have a 150% damage modifier (the damage being modified in question is anywhere between 100-250 damage to regular targets that are not named BB Princess or CV Princess/Demon, around 70-200 to regular bosses). Competitive Pokemon is rather simple, just no legendary Pokemon.