Fire Emblem is a long standing series with it’s Western debut on the Game Boy Advance in 2003. It has a large amount of titles, all with the same strategy play-style and win condition save Fire Emblem Heroes and Fire Emblem Warriors.

It’s a classic tactical RPG, which means you recruit characters and level them up through turn based combat. In Fire Emblem, you recruit characters from just playing the campaign, and progressing through the levels. Enemies will gradually gain more stats as you progress, so leveling up your characters is an extremely important aspect of the game. Choosing who to level, what items they should get, and what stats to build is the macro aspect of Fire Emblem. In the earlier Fire Emblem games, there isn’t a way to replay levels or grind for experience, meaning that you can only improve your characters from a finite amount of gameplay. This implies that you probably won’t be able to level every character up to the maximum, and choosing who you need is really important if you want to succeed late game.
The tactical aspect of the game is also really strategic, and it differs from many other strategy games in how valuable each character is. Fire Emblem has a mechanic known as Permadeath, if one of your non-main characters die in combat, they will stay dead for the entirety of the game. You may of course, reload the save and redo the mission, however some levels in Fire Emblem take up to an hour to finish if you are under-leveled and need to play safe.
If a main character dies, it’s immediately game over and you restart from where you last saved.
The Permadeath mechanic means that you have to play a lot more conservative than in a game like Advance wars or Starcraft where you can afford to just throw away units like fodder. Fire Emblem requires much more baiting, traps and ambushes in it’s tactics. Luring in enemy units, and then finishing them off with a character you want to level is the essential way to safely play this game.
Another important mechanic in Fire Emblem is the Weapon Triangle. It’s essentially a Rock-Paper-Scissors dynamic between weapons and spells, but it’s important due to it’s heavy impact in gameplay.

Swords beat Axes, Axes beat Lances, and Lances beat Swords. In a similar regard, spell tomes beat bows, bows beat stealth weapons like knives or shurikens, and stealth weapons beat tomes.
All of this combined means that critical and analytical thinking are the foundation of building a strong late-game. Early game Fire Emblem can really just be carried by a Unit with strong base stats and a big weapon.Fire Emblem’s RPG Mechanics make it extremely different from the straight tactical strategy in Advance Wars.