For me it’s that sacrifice strategies aren’t sustainable, and can come with an extreme downside. Even in games where you can’t or don’t leave units dead, it still changes how you play, and I think that fundamental principle is cool
Also FE has some great game feel
I’m not counting the ones from Shadow Dragon. You had to lose units to get them.
this is the perfect example of why features that are optional and let the people who have a harder time with these games still feel like they’re accomplishing something.
PSA to fire emblem fans: don’t admonish ways to make this hard ass game easier
Simple formula, harder-than-average challenge at minimum, and permadeath.
I think FE’s most unique gameplay trait is emergent narrative – or rather, game mechanics that organically create it.
The game is set up in a way that story will naturally be created as the player plays the game. Ingredients like the SRPG grid-based structure, permadeath, battle conversations that trigger when certain characters fight, each soldier having a name and characterization instead of being faceless, etc are important for maintaining this feeling in the game, so the player can create their own personalized storyline by playing through the game normally. In this vein I believe any FE game worth its salt has gameplay that is directly tied to its story in some way. (I guess I’m kinda cheating since you said no story but I really don’t think I can talk about this without avoiding story, and I really do believe this to be FE’s most unique selling point)
I cannot undersell how important I believe this mechanical setup to be. Without the tools for emergent narrative you’re basically just playing any other SRPG with a stiffer, more linear gameplay experience that has less narrative potential (i:e Stella Glow) or faceless nobodies as your units (Advance Wars).
One thing I often see people forget is that the battles in FE take place that is quite frankly different from most other tactical RPGs. The way units line up and are positioned feels more like chess to me that other games. For me, there are many grid based tactical RPGs that feel like standard RPGs with grids that are just long wait steps for the actual fight. Their positioning means little because the number of characters in the fight are too few, the large attack range relative to the size of the field making position pointless, or just raw stats outclassing everything. Body blocking, positional trade offs, and other systems that interact with the position of the characters are important. I like games like FFTA and Fae Tactics because they have good systems that encourage positional thinking, but FE’s relative simplicity kind of makes the game feel more chess like, which I haven’t really seen elsewhere.