What if Tear Ring Saga was an actual Fire Emblem game?

[Jotari]

This is similar to the recent thread on "What if Kaga never left Nintendo", but the scenario is distinct enough that I think it warrants its own thread. This is the situation. Kaga leaves Intelligent Systems, still finds Tearnanog and develops Tear Ring Saga with the same team, only, it's released on the Nintendo 64 under the Fire Emblem brand with the only changes to the game being some more standard Fire Emblem names. It becomes an official part of Fire Emblem  history moving forward, essentially having been co-developed alongside Binding Blade, so our point of divergence is any titles released after Binding Blade that would have potential inspiration from Tear Ring Saga built into them (this is only for TRS, Kaga then goes into hibernation and when he released Berwick and stuff it's not Fire Emblem).

For example, if this were to happen, then I think we would have gotten shields in Path of Radiance. The series already had shields in Gaiden, but they're much more interesting in Tear Ring Saga, being items with durability that break after sustaining a certain amount of hits. I feel this would fit very well into Path of Radiance's equipment system. Another item from Tear Ring Saga that would probably work very well in the main series and possibly could have been seen as early as Blazing Blade is the Miracle Charm or Amulet. An item of moderate rarity and cost that lets you survive a lethal hit with 1hp and breaks after use. It's something I'm kind of surprised the series has never went for with the increasing casualization in regards to perma death. Maybe Casual mode is the very reason we haven't seen it, but even in casual mode, being able to survive a lethal attack still has some value as you can keep that unit around for the rest of the chapter.

Another thing to consider here is the crossover stuff. How would the existence of an additional Fire Emblem title in the history of the series impact the later cross over stuff (so, Emblem Runan or Embelm Holmes in Engage? It has to be Emblem Holmes right?), including Smash Bros. we could see Runan instead of Roy in Melee. Though if it were a 2001 N64 title it might be possible that Nintendo wouldn't care about promoting it at all because it would have little chance of actually doing well (which might be the very reason Kaga released it on Playstation, for all we know he wanted to stick with Nintendo, but they turned him down).