Video Game / Fire Emblem: Thracia 776

Reclaim your homeland, against all odds.

As ages passed and the 12 Crusaders became the talk of legends, a great rebellion arose and spread throughout the Land of Jugdral.

— Opening demo (completely untranslated in a Japanese game)

Fire Emblem: Thracia 776 is the fifth game in Nintendo's Fire Emblem series, released only in Japan on the Super Famicom on September 1, 1999.^note The game was initially only available by downloading it to the Nintendo Power cartridge, with standard carts made available on January 21, 2000. It is the last Fire Emblem title that series creator Shouzou Kaga worked on before leaving developer Intelligent Systems.

The game is an interquel for Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, taking place toward the end of its 17 year Time Skip. It follows Leif, nephew of Sigurd and cousin of Seliph, as he tries to retake his country and fight back against the corrupted Grannvale Empire.

Thracia 776 is both more like a normal Fire Emblem game than its predecessor and quite different to most others — it returns to normal-sized chapters and maps, but it implements a few new gameplay mechanics like the Fog of War and the completely-forgotten fatigue meter. It's also notoriously Nintendo Hard, even by the standards of the franchise as a whole, mostly by virtue of what it fails to present to the player rather than what it actually presents.

Thracia 776 is followed by the Game Boy Advance game Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade, which takes place on the continent of Elibe in a new continuity.

---

Thracia 776 provides examples of:

• Anti-Air: Ballistae, courtesy of their high might and accuracy.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • This game has the same exp gain for simply being in a fight as landing a hit. Most games give as little as 1 exp for just being in a fight. This means that if you're willing to take the fatigue loss, pretty much any unit can be raised into some kind of relevance by having them simply wail on a disarmed enemy with a broken weapon for a while.
  • While staves can miss, they do not consume charges for doing so, and still build XP and staff rank for it (some characters even try to miss on purpose during speedruns).
  • Leif can never be the target of status staves, making it impossible for the game to be rendered unwinnable by him being put to sleep or berserked before the player can cure it.
• Anti-Grinding: The Fatigue system very heavily encourages you to not dawdle and avoid overworking your units (both of which are very necessary in traditional grinding), since having them fighting for too long can result in them staying behind to rest in the next map. It is still quite possible to grind, but it can be tricky to do it sensibly—for instance, arena-grinding is very difficult to pull off, as it requires you to be okay with likely missing out on your main healer for the next map. The low stat caps of 20 and generally stellar promotion gains tend to disincentivize it even further, as you don't need a character at their max level for them to cap most of their relevant stats, even if they haven't been scrolled up.
• Artificial Brilliance: Though the AI in Thracia is known to be as suicidally aggressive as most other Fire Emblem AI, it's also known to do some surprisingly clever things when provoked. Most notably, the AI will actually respond to a unit's weapon being stolen by having another unit hand off their weapon to the victim (one of the few instances in the series where you'll ever see two enemies trade), and in some maps, disarmed enemies have been known to run to the nearest shop and buy new weapons.
• Ascended Fridge Horror:
  • Before the first battle in the game, Eyvel explains that the lower ranking members of the Imperial army are conscripts made to fight against their will; because of this, she insists on capturing, disarming, and releasing them instead.
  • The brigands in most Fire Emblem games are just Opportunistic Bastards seeking to take advantage of the circumstances that prevent law and order from being implemented, be it the chaos of war or the corrupt incompetence of The Empire. In this setting, they're Justified Criminals that have been forced into a life of brigading, due to generational poverty imposed upon them by the infertile mountain ranges of Southern Thracia. Dagdar's initial attempt to reform the Mount Violdrake Bandits fails because of how starved they've become in following his commands to lead a more civil life.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The most famous is the "Penta-Axe" general in Chapter 23.
• Character Customization: You can bestow several specific skills on any of your units via a Skill Manual, and you can also boost some stats with special rings. Since all units have completely unchangeable traits (skills and weapons of choice among them), this can give a unit with no skills or a low starting level some extra leeway. There are only one of each kind of manual/ring available in the game, however.
• Class Change Level Reset: As with the games in the prior Archanea series, promoting in Thracia resets your level to 1. However, Thracia also uses the level-scaling XP formula from Genealogy (prior to that point, XP was just a flat number and didn't scale to anything), and to compensate, introduced the idea that promoted units counted as high-level.
• Cheat Code: A "Paragon Mode" can be unlocked by highlighting an empty save slot, then pressing right, left, right, left, right, left, right, and right. This gives all units the effects of the experience-boosting Paragon skill, and it also stacks with those with that skill naturally.
• Corrupt the Cutie: Mareeta's backstory involves a lot of these. She was an innocent girl living in hiding with her fallen prince father, who did what he could to keep her safe and next to him. They were doing fine as travellers, but once Galzus was distracted for a mere second - BAM! Young Mareeta was kidnapped by slave traders and taken into a slave market. Thank God Eyvel was there for her, but if she wasn't... This is invoked again at the beginning, when Mareeta and Eyvel's other daughter Nanna get caught by the enemy, and you have to fight a Brainwashed and Crazy Mareeta who's under the influence of an Evil Weapon...
• Critical Hit: It works differently than the other games in the series (minus Genealogy of the Holy War which shares the same mechanic as here): critical hits here deals straightly double the damage shown in the fighting window (which means that 20 attack vs 20 defense = 20 damage because 20x2= 40, instead of 0x3= 0 because 20-20=0).
• Cruel Mercy: Capturing and releasing bosses rather than simply killing them will often lead to this trope.
  • Haughty characters such as Kempf, Veld, and Galzus will be left humiliated after having been spared by their enemies, with the latter even lampshading this in their release quote:
    "Tch... Being at the mercy of an enemy... I've fallen so far..."
  • If Amalda had been captured and released in Chapter 17B (the route which she cannot be recruited on), she will ask whether she is "doomed to watch this nightmare continue".
• Crutch Character:
  • Eyvel is probably the best example of this in the series. Yeah, Jagen and Marcus in The Binding Blade are probably considered the archetypical examples; but Eyvel is removed from the player's party relatively early on, and doesn't return until very late game, and even then only if you visit a certain side chapter. Furthermore, the game will literally rig the RNG so that she can't die early in the game, in order to ensure that she gets turned to stone by Veld in chapter 5.
  • For the characters that can be considered one, there's Finn and Dagdar. Finn actually has a good stats growth, and is a solid unit throughout the whole game, but he is put on a disadvantage for the late game indoor chapters thanks to dismounting, which means he can't use Lances, including his signature Brave Lance. Dagdar is a prepromote with bad growth, but good enough base stats to be used for the entire game. Both of them are essential to build up your resource through capturing, since they are basically tailor made for capturing.
• Cutting Off the Branches: The returning Gen 2 characters of Genealogy have set in stone parents, despite these characters being customizable in that game.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: In this game, the priority of some commands on the action menu is mixed up. The "Wait" option is normally on the bottom, but it's placed above pretty much everything but "Attack" while "Staff" has taken its place. The absolute highest priority command in the game is "Escape" instead of "Attack", meaning that if you're on a map with a castle to guard that is also the escape square, every single turn you have a chance of making the sole unit standing between the enemies and your defeat vanish from the map for the rest of the battle.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Courtesy of the Loptr Mage Salem, who is also the very first playable dark magic-wielding character in the series. He is one of the few who have escaped the wrath of the Loptr Church, ultimately joining Leif's army out of atonement for his time with them, and his ending involves him writing memoirs that bring to light of what the Loptr Church was actually like.
• Deconstructor Fleet: Leif's story is a Decontruction of Marth's story from start to finish. Both lords were driven from their homeland and retook it, but Leif runs into a more Crapsack World. Leif had to run from place to place since he was two, and with only one knight to protect him consistently. Priestess captured by pirates? The thief who looks like he's letting her out just wants to take advantage of her. Leif's first time in a castle is breaking out of the dungeon. Lots of those who join him have unsavoury motives. Most of Leif's journey seems less like a liberation army and more like a refugee group, given how much of their movements are based on being chased. Worst of all, while Leif succeeds in liberating Leonster, he and his army are besieged by the very empire he retook it from until Seliph bails him out. Ultimately reconstructed once Leif and his army succeed in their goals in the very end.
• Defog of War: If Fog of War is present, using the "Torch" item removes some of it within a set radius.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Finn's Brave Lance allows him to attack twice in one turn, so he can crush the first arc of the game with it.
  • Osian's Vouge, a special hand axe that's lighter, more powerful, almost twice as accurate, and comes with a greatly increased chance of landing a critical hit.
• Dungeon Bypass: Warp staves can teleport the target to any other tile on the map, which can be used to trivialize a number of levels by sending your characters straight to the objective.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: This game more or less sets the standards of almost all Fire Emblem games to follow, if not strictly in mechanics, then in presentation. Among the biggest mainstays are the Weapon Ranking system (Ranks E to A, with weapon usage increasing it), an item that promotes just about any unit, side chapters with steps to unlocking them, giving thieves the ability to steal, the ability to rescue other units, Fog of War, and a fully balanced weapon/magic triangle. The overall length of this game (24 Chapters, an endgame chapter, and 10 side chapters) is more or less what every game thereafter follows, with a few exceptions. There are still some major differences, however:
  • The aforementioned Fog of War is pitch black, likely due to mechanical limitations, meaning that not only can the player not see any enemies enshrouded in it, but they cannot see any parts of the map that is enshrouded either. What's more, thieves do not get any additional sight in the fog, and aside from Chapter 12, Fog of War only occurs during the gaiden chapters.
  • Like in Genealogy, skills tend to be more character-based than class-restricted: some characters come with a plethora of skills, while others have none at all. Attack-based skills in particular are much stronger than their later incarnations (Sol, for example, heals all damage the attacker has inflicted as opposed to half). Similarly, characters that may start in the same class will not always promote to the same advanced class (Mages Asbel and Miranda respectively promoting to Sage and Mage Knight, for example); all other games either have one promotion per base class or bestow more options.
  • This game reuses several mechanics from Mystery of the Emblem, and after this game, they would either be repurposed (the Bond Support system) or completely removed, such as dismounting (and forcibly changing weapons, Staves whose effects can effect just about anywhere on the map, and the stat-boosting Crusader scrolls (which serve the same purpose as the Star Shards in Mystery). The support system in this game has characters receiving strictly 10% (or 20% in some rare cases) support bonuses in certain areas from specific units; later games revamp this with Support conversations and stronger stat bonuses.
  • While you can capture units in Fire Emblem Fates, it is not as extensive or as vital as in this game. When you capture a unit, your stats bar Luck and Build are halved (similar to Rescuing), and you can either keep them on you or release them; you can also freely steal their items. Capturing certain characters and bosses are actually required for either recruiting new allies or unlocking gaiden chapters.
  • This is the only game with a shared stat that isn't Strength and Magic (Magic is the same as Resistance, meaning that resistance-boosting items and spells also increases magic attack). Also, Constitution/Build and Movement are stats that level up normally, although growths for both are extremely low across the board, with a few exceptions. Tying in with Movement are Movement Stars, which give some units a percentage of a chance to move again.
  • This game's Dancer starts off as a Thief. The only way to promote her into a Dancer is to have her talk to the boss in a gaiden chapter; if she does not meet this requirement, then you lose out on it. If you do manage to obtain this, you can freely promote her back and forth between Dancer and Thief/Thief Fighter, though.
  • The character menu in this game is somewhat odd, and can trip up veteran players if not adhered to. For one, the "Wait" option is the very first option on the menu (hacks of the game immediately corrected this to stop Damn You, Muscle Memory!). Also, you cannot select your character's starting location on the Battle Preparations screen; in order to put a character elsewhere, you need to change the order of the characters on the unit deployment screen.
  • This is the final game in the series to use a plain, single-number RNG for attack accuracy.
• Empty Levels: Present here just as the rest of the series, but they are not as undermining, as the stat cap of 20 implies that sporting good bases AND/OR good skills would automatically infer that such one character would have a better use short/long term than another one (for example, even a very screwed character such as Sara would be extremely useful thanks to good bases, skills and weapon ranks).
• Extra Turn:
  • Movement stars grants units the chance to move again, with each star giving a 5% rate.
  • Lara the Thief could be turned into a Dancer by having her talk to Perne in Chapter 12x, which gives her the utility to refresh allies that have already acted.
• Fake Difficulty: A few maps, notably Chapter 4x, are utterly dependent on RNG and luck rather than good strategy.
• The Fellowship Has Ended: Enforced; because Leif and Nanna are the only two playable characters to appear in the second half of Genealogy of the Holy War, the rest of his surviving Ragtag Bunch of Misfits are sent off to live out their lives independent of either him or Seliph.
• Fog of War: The first game in the series to utilize it. Due to technical limitations, it's completely black and will block off the majority of the map unless a Torch or a Torch Staff is used.
• For Science!: Since Cirosan disliked the blandness of the M-Up/Ensorcel Staff dialogue even in Japanese, the Project Exile Fan Translation adds a detail about how some random peasant would have such an item. Turns out, said peasant is a wannabe botanist, and he wanted to see what would happen if you were to use Pure Water - medicine that raises the drinker's magic - to water garden plants. As it turns out, Pure Water transforms plants into Ensorcel Staves. Oops. At least it's something to give to random resistance soldiers...
• Foregone Conclusion: The entirety of this game is set in between Chapters 6 and 7 of Genealogy of the Holy War. Naturally, certain characters survive, and players who have played Genealogy will know that Leif's victory at the end here is fairly brief; while he has liberated Munster, he winds up struggling against Southern Thracia until Seliph's army appears to save him.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Despite the ending, it's possible to have Finn, Nanna, Diarmuid, and Ced die during the game (and it is told as such if they do), despite the fact that all of them canonically survive long enough to fight during the events of Genealogy. The same goes for Eyvel, should she be killed after you free her in Chapter 24x. Her ending states that she reunites with Febail and Patty after the Final Holy War, and Word of God via a guide confirms that she does, in fact, survive.
• Hero of Another Story: Leif, who is a regular unit in the second half of Genealogy, is the main Lord of this game.
• Heroic Bastard: Fergus and Saias. The former is the bastard son of Beowolf and an unnamed princess of Conote, while the latter is the bastard son of none other than Arvis, who at this point in time is the Emperor of Granvale, and his Number Two, the Mage Fighter Aida. Saias' parentage also notes that he's the one who inherited his father's Major Fjalar blood, as Arvis' two other children have the Major blood markings of Naga and Loptous instead.
• Heroic Lineage:
  • Leif's in particular has been a source of anguish for most of his life. As Quan's son, the true heir of Leonster, and a carrier of the bloodlines of Njörun and Baldr (it's his older sister who has Quan's Major Njörun blood, but at this point, she's been raised as a princess of Thracia from youth), enemies await him at every turn. The story is set in motion primarily because Leif is completely fed up with the Empire's tyranny and the suffering that his heritage has caused others. His knight and caretaker Finn has been sheltering him and suffering for it since the boy's youth, and many parts of northern Thracia have been torn apart in his name, with the biggest being the Ulster District. Miranda, Ulster's princess, holds a massive grudge against Leif due to her kingdom falling and the fact that her father was executed for hiding Leif at one point.
  • Several members of Leif's army are descendants of the Twelve Crusaders. Nanna and Diarmuid are Princess Lachesis' children and possess minor Hezul blood; Linoan, the duchess of Tahra, is a descendant of Heim, and thus possesses minor Naga Holy Blood; and you can optionally recruit Ced, the son of Lewyn and Erinys, and the holder of major Forseti Blood. You also briefly meet Hannibal's son, Coirpre, who possesses Minor Bragi blood. Dialogue between Raydrik and Veld reveals that Mareeta is of Od's bloodline (thus Galzus is by extension, as he's the former Prince of Issach's Rivough Castle and her father), Eyvel is actually Brigid, the rightful heiress of Yngvi and holder of major Ulir blood, and finally, Saias is the one who inherited Arvis' Major Fjalar blood; see Heroic Bastard above.
• Hijacked by Ganon: The last chapter reveals that the Loptr Church manipulated Travant into killing Quan and Ethlyn.
• Inconsistent Spelling: Fire Emblem Heroes has done this to a lot of character and location names, much like Genealogy of the Holy War. While most of them were finalized since the first Choose Your Legends poll, the rest weren't spared, with the game changing the spellings to either match the namesake better or just add and remove a consonant or two.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Pretty much every character exclusive weapon counts as one. There's also the Brave weapons, which count as Disc-One Nuke thanks to how early they are acquired in the game.
• Infinity +1 Sword: There are two of them:
  • The Bragi Sword (also a Sword of Plot Advancement of sorts) is a 15 MT weapon with armorslaying capabilities and plenty of usage. It also gives the Miracle ability, and negates the damage halving ability of the Loptous Sword. While it supposedly can be used by anyone with a Holy Blood, only Leif, Nanna, Fergus, and Diarmuid can use the sword.
  • Last but not least, is the Forseti, which is equipped by the 11th-Hour Ranger Ced. It gives the wielder an extra 20 in skill, and 20 in speed (a total of 14 thanks to its weight), alongside 20 MT with 30% critical rate and can be used 50 times. Ced equipped with the Forseti can one round pretty much every single enemy in the remaining chapters with or without an M-Up/Ensorcel or Pure Water boost, and can only be killed if you are really unlucky against physical attacks.
• Interquel: Takes place in between chapters 6 and 7 of Genealogy.
• Invulnerable Civilians: Averted even more so than in Genealogy. They can also be captured by enemy soldiers and taken away (which is good, because you can kill the soldiers holding them).
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Everyone fighting for under Leif's beacon can potentially freeload everything off any enemy they capture.
• Killed Offscreen: Galzus, Dagdar, Eyvel, Sara, and Lifis always become Deadlords if they aren't recruited, even if they don't die in the chapter they can be recruited in.
• Last Disc Magic: Forseti by Ced's courtesy in Chapter 23 is this.
• Lethal Joke Character: With the help of Crusader Scrolls and Skill Manuals, it's possible for even the weakest characters, like Marty or Shannam, to turn into cornerstones of your army.
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards:
  • Played really straight, in a much bigger extent than the rest of the game in the series. Late game warriors can kill an enemy, and be a target for status staves. Late game Sages/High Priests kill an enemy, laugh at the status staves, and played a practical joke with the game as a whole. It's not an exaggeration to say that most of the late game chapters are pretty much staves vs. staves combat.
  • Pretty much any character with reasonable staff rank and/or high magic stat can be this. Thracia takes this trope to an absurd length, so much that late game chapters can be utterly trivialized by using the right staves at the right time. Anyone who promotes into a Sage counts as one, thanks to the ridiculous promotion gains the class offers.
• Magikarp Power: As always for the franchise, many characters require a bit of legwork to reach their full potential, but end up rather potent by the end. Any low-level staff user qualifies, as do characters with high growths, useful abilities, or good personal parameters, but bad base stats, and some, like Sara, are both.
• Mercy Rewarded: Capture causes your stats to be heavily lowered, but you can capture the defeated enemy and seize their items, as well as access to the secret shop being limited to players who only captured Leonster soldiers in chapter 19. This is very useful since equipment is expensive and not very durable.
• Merging the Branches: While Ced's dad is pretty much set in stone, Diarmuid and Nanna's parentage is... weird. It's all but stated that Nanna's dad is Finn, but it's also all but stated that Diarmuid's dad is Beowolf. There's an implication in Genealogy that Beowolf broke up with Lachesis, making her romance with Finn a Second Love, but this isn't possible to do in-game and isn't entirely clear.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: There are a fair number of units that only join up depending on the route you choose during Chapter 15.
  • Path A gives you the chance to recruit Sleuf, a Priest, and Misha, a Pegasus Knight.
    • Additionally, if you didn't recruit Olwen in Chapter 12x (or if she was killed), then Ilios can join your army in Chapter 16A as a replacement; he has better stats and skills than Olwen right off the bat, but lacks her personal weapons and story relevance.
  • Path B lets you recruit Shannam, a Swordmaster, and Miranda, a Mage.
  • After the paths reconvene, there are two enemy Paladins in Chapter 19 that can join Leif's army, but the characters who recruit them are route exclusive (Sleuf for Amalda, and Miranda for Conomore), making them mutually exclusive by extension.
  • In an example not related to the Chapter 15 route split, Saias will leave your army if you choose to recruit Ced in Chapter 23.
• My Rules Are Not Your Rules: Capturing works notably differently for the AI than it does for the player—some good, some bad. On the plus side, the AI will never release units, making enemies carrying someone incredibly easy to take down. On the downside, while you can't strip a unit of their stuff on the same turn you capture them, the AI doesn't have the same limitation.
• Never Trust a Trailer: The only known advertisement for Thracia 776 is a Lawson promo, and it's... a sight to behold. The entire ad involves a farewell ceremony for a boy transferring into a different school, followed by his entire classroom pulling off a dance. The boy would later end up joining in on the dance as well, before cutting into the gameplay footage. Aside from the aforementioned gameplay footage, the advertisement has absolutely nothing to do with Thracia 776.
• Nintendo Hard: The series is normally pretty hard itself, but in a game where Heal Staves can miss, Thracia 776 turns it up a notch. The game relies on surprise factor, its enemy and obstacles placements and map design for most of its difficulty, but also utilizes its unique mechanics to make things overly challenging even by the series' standards.
• No Fair Cheating: Gungnir exists, but is unused. It has a description telling you not to hack.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Capturing can generally only be done at low HP, and when you release a unit, they leave the battlefield and don't return. The benefit from this is that you can take the enemy's equipment, in a game in which equipment doesn't have much durability and is very expensive to purchase.
• Obvious Rule Patch: In the prior game, Vantage and Wrath could be combined with the proper setup, creating a unit that always attacks first and also always crits when attacked. Thracia, which buffed both skills considerably and allowed skills to be more freely assigned, therefore made it so that Vantage and Wrath could not be shared by the same unit (attempting to do so merely gives the unit in question Vantage).
• Official Couple: In Genealogy of the Holy War, all pairings except Sigurd/Deirdre, Quan/Ethlyn and Arvis/Deirdre were optional and customizable. However, some are set in stone by the events of this game.
  • Lewyn/Erinys was canonized in Thracia 776 through the presence of Ced and Forseti in the game. The marriage didn't end very happily though, due to either personal difficulties or Lewyn having his memories and/or personality messed with upon being revived/possessed by Forseti.
  • Also, this game strongly hints at Lachesis/Beowolf and Lachesis/Finn—yes, both of them, as Beowolf is Diarmuid's daddy and Finn is Nanna's. Also, Beowolf seems to have another son with an unnamed noblewoman of Conote, Fergus, who's a playable character here. This makes Diarmuid, who already has Nanna as a maternal half-sister, have another half-sibling on his dad's side. Yes, the families in this game are really fucked up.
  • Nanna/Leif, assuming Nanna doesn't die during the course of the game. This is reflected in their support bonuses: for all the characters that Leif is able to provide bonuses for, the only one to provide him a bonus is Nanna.
  • Likewise, Fred and Olwen marry if neither kicks it. Same goes to Machyua and Brighton, and Tanya and Osian. While not as openly stated, Princess Miranda is hinted to have married Conomore, which doubles as May–December Romance since he was her father's retainer.
  • Selphina and Glade are already Happily Married, too.
• One-Man Army: Many characters are capable of destroying entire armies with enough training, as the enemy's have atypically low stats throughout the game.
• One Stat to Rule Them All: In this game, the one stat that rules all is Movement, because it can grow, despite the very slim change for it to happen (5% being the naturally highest percentage growth in the game, reaching a whopping 10% if the correct Crusader Scroll is given to the character with such growth).
• Optional Boss: In Chapter 5, 6 and 24, you can decide to either let Galzus live or attempt to kill him. In his first appearances, it's mostly a Hopeless Boss Fight, and while you can beat him with some luck and abusing the capture mechanics, it's really not recommended, as it means he can't join you. In Chapter 24, he's off to the side, meaning you can ignore him—though, again, he's a harder fight than his actual boss, and if he can proc either of his skills, it will usually mean instant death.
• Promoted to Playable: Of all things, generic units are playable for the first time in Chapter 13 as part of Glade’s personal squad.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The army consists of anyone who has a loose reason to fight against the Empire, some who are persuaded by someone in the army, or people Leif's army kidnapped. An early indicator is Lifis, the first thief to join the game. Thieves in Fire Emblem games before and after Thracia lean towards Lovable Rogue. Lifis is a pirate who pillaged villages, tried to manipulate Safy into sleeping with him and joined because he would have been executed otherwise.
• Random Number God: It may just be at its worst here; the numbers will never reach either 0 or 100, meaning there's never a guarantee of hitting and missing, and the numbers in-between can be a wonky measure of the outcome.
• Retcon: Being an interquel, it's no surprise Thracia 776 indulges in this.
  • Leif's entire army could count, as when Leif was first encountered in the previous game he only had Finn and Nanna at his side, while in this game, he has them and then some, with an army that rivals, if not surpasses Seliph's.
  • Ced being the son of Lewyn is the most noticeable one. While it was a fairly common pairing at the time of Holy War, there was nothing making it any more canon than the other pairings. Now, Ced being royalty and Forseti-wielder is a trait of his.
  • The climax of Thracia 776 takes place at Munster after Leif joined Seliph's liberation. To not make the end of the game filled with several new units, the game instead has Leif split up and seize Munster with his personal army.
• Shades of Conflict:
  • Main Characters - On the white end of the scale you have the heroic and sheltered Prince Leif and the remnants of the Leonster Knights. Around the grey area you have you have Lifis who wreaked havoc on Thracian civilians, Perne, who's a thief, albeit a good-natured one. Not to mention there's a couple of Punch Clock Heroes that join just because they're there at the right moment (Fergus, Shiva, Troude, and Ralf). Also, there's the Bishop August who seems to have a morally ambiguous past and holds a cynical view towards the Munster nobles.
  • Enemy Characters - Around the grey end, there's a good amount of enemy bosses who fit here such as Largo (Dryas even commends Leif if he captures Largo instead of killing him), Rumay, Gomes (a bandit no less), and Reinhardt. Around or near the black area is Kempf (a man who even his fellow commanders view with disgust), Raydrik, and Veld.
• Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: One of the more famous examples of this in the series—chances are, if a character or story element is mentioned, it pops up in the gameplay, and the gameplay design of characters tends to reflect their displayed personality traits. There are also many story elements that are primarily implied through gameplay, such as Fergus's status as a possible Heroic Bastard. More than that, the story's themes of pragmatism, War Is Hell, and not needing to be a great crusader to be a hero are generally carried through in the gameplay, where the player endures difficult and chaotic challenges that can easily go wrong, relies on trickery and theft, and finds that just about every character is usable.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Leif looks extremely similar to Quan. Hannibal mentioned this during their conversation.
• Support Power: Authority stars are these, as each one of the authority star attributed to one of the various factions on gamemap will allow each unit of such faction to receive an additional 3% bonus on hit and avoid.
• Taken for Granite: The Big Bad's modus operandi. Eyvel gets hit with it early on. You can undo this in a sidequest chapter later on, if you meet certain requirements.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The Grannvale Empire summons armies from across the continent (including the House Friege's elite squadron, the Gelbenritter), all to attack the city-state of Tahra. And this isn't even mentioning calling both the Thracian Dragon Knights and Schwarze Rosen, the elite division of the Loptr Church, as reinforcements.
• Trope Codifier: Sort of, in a series internal sense - for all its unique features, Thracia 776 still plays much closer to and feels more like every Fire Emblem game since, Archanea remakes aside, than its predecessors do; as such, it could be said to be the game which set the mold for the franchise's modern incarnations.
• Unblockable Attack: The "Luna" skill allows any unit that possess it to have a top 20% (25% if wielding a skill boosting weapon) chance to not miss the attack and deplete the enemy of all defense (either magical or physical) for that one attack; same concept applied for the "Solar" Skill, but instead of neglecting the enemy its defense, the amount of damage inflicted will be absorbed by the attacker.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • The Capture mechanic allows this outside of recruiting some enemies. Sure, you may loot the enemy of their belongings, but you still let them live for another day instead of outright killing them. Especially when you use it on sympathetic characters like Gomes and Reinhardt. (Good luck with that, though.)
  • The main reason players take the final gaiden chapter in the game is to rescue Eyvel and prevent her from becoming a Deadlord. This chapter is one of the hardest - or at least most annoying - levels in the game, and would otherwise not be worth the effort.
• Video Game Stealing: This game is notable for being the only Fire Emblem game where thieves can steal anything, even the weapon your opponent has equipped (if they have enough speed and constitution). This makes them some of the most valuable units in the game, behind staff users.
• Walk into Mordor: Implemented as a game mechanic, as mounted units are forced to remain dismounted for indoor chapters, which includes Munster Castle.

---