Recently I was thinking about its iconic permadeath rule: if one of your units dies in battle, you'll never get them back. Only the handful of protagonists must be kept alive to progress. Otherwise, no character's survival is necessary in order to complete the game. Growing up, I recall this being the one thing Fire Emblem was known for, the source of its brutal reputation.
Here are two seemingly-conflicting facts about it:
1) The game has several major design decisions that assume the player will accept a character's death and march on forward in spite of it. For example, they continue to introduce new characters all the way through the penultimate chapter, clearly intended to "replace" characters you may have lost up to this point (e.g. "better grant them a light-magic user at the 11th hour, just in case their other light-magic users died at some point!").
2) Almost nobody on Earth plays that way. The almost-universal norm for vanilla playthroughs of old Fire Emblem games is to reset the chapter the moment a character dies. That's just... how it's done.
What's with that?
