While this game follows a strict formula in most cases, the developers have occasionally broken some old trends to bring something completely new and/or unexpected.
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New Hero banners
- The fourth installment of the Choose Your Legends banners broke a couple of trends:
- Since launch, the Choose Your Legends banners had associated paralogues. The fourth installment had a main story chapter going along with it instead.
- The fourth installment is the first not to involve recurring artists Kita Senri or Kozaki Yusuke, as well as a Cavalry unit and a Sword wielder.
- For the first three years of Choose your Legends, the winners consist of at least one Elibean. This installment of Choose your Legends has none, as there were no Elibe winners.
- The fifth installment of the Choose Your Legends banners gave every single unit a unique skill when previously only the winners acquired unique skills.
- Every mainline game (Echoes and Three Houses) since Heroes has come out has featured the units with two story chapter banners in a row. However, when Engage came out, only 1 story banner came out, with other entries following suit instead.
- All of the Fallen Heroes banners before 2021 dealt with heroes driven mad by external and supernatural sources, such as Demonic Possession or an Artifact of Doom. "Forces of Will" introduces Fallen Dimitri and Fallen Orson, who were both driven mad by conventional Trauma Conga Lines. In addition, Fallen Dimitri was also the first fallen hero to not have glowing red eyes to indicate that he's a fallen hero, as he retains his normal eye color instead.
- The Beyond Control banner features Fallen Gustav, marking the first instance of a Heroes original character on a Fallen banner, as well as the first (and currently only) Fallen hero without a Battle Aura.
- The 2023 Fallen Heroes banner has Fallen Female Byleth, who breaks the trend of fallen heroes having a purple Battle Aura. Hers is green instead.
- The seventh Choose Your Legends banner, Turn of Fate, is the first Choose Your Legends banner where the blue unit (Gullveig) is not a lance user. It's also the first Choose Your Legends banner where the sword user (Robin) is not the first to be introduced chronologically, as Brave Soren is a green mage instead.
- The October 2023 New Heroes banner, which introduced Attuned Heroes with new variants of Peony and Triandra, broke plenty of trends:
- This marked the first time multiple Heroes original characters were featured on a banner focused on another game as opposed to just one.
- It also marked the first time the Heroes original characters were featured in the banner's corresponding Forging Bonds event. Previous banners dedicated to specific games that featured a Heroes character replaced them with an additional demote in the banner's corresponding Forging Bonds story. In this case, the Attuned alfar shared a banner with two units from Shadows of Valentia and were featured in its Forging Bonds event instead of Hestia, a main pool unit from Shadows of Valentia who was added alongside the actual banner as a quest reward.
- Finally, it was also the first New Heroes banner with only one non-limited unit, that being Mycen.
- February 2024's New Heroes banner added Ivy and Hortensia as an Attuned and Rearmed Hero, respectively, making it the first New Heroes banner with more than one asset hero where none of them hail from Heroes itself.
Special Hero banners
- While it wasn't the first seasonal banner to include units from games not from Awakening and/or Fates (Bridal Blessings had Caeda and Lyn), Love Abounds from 2018 was the first to not include characters from the aforementioned games at all. It instead featured characters from the Elibe games (including Lyn herself).
- 2020's winter banner features a Cavalry mage (Winter Bernadetta) and an Infantry sword (Winter Harmonized Altina & Sanaki) when all the previous winter banners were composed entirely of Armored units.
- All Special Hero banners starting from "Summer's Arrival" in June 2018 have two of the special heroes teased as silhouettes the day before their trailer is released. The "New Year: ω Special Heroes" in January 2021 was the first banner since that had the trailer drop without the silhouettes revealed to players beforehand.
- September 2021 did away with the annual dancer seasonal banner. Instead, a Day of the Twelve Festival in Jugdral is the spotlight, with no Sing/Dance user in sight.
- The 2022 Awakening-themed Valentine's event, "Here with Me", unlike previous Valentine's events, only had one cavalry unit (as opposed to at least two), featured a mother and child pair in addition to the father and child, and had the father not be an Armor unit, who also did not die during the main events of his home game(s).
- The first Summer 2022 banner, which features the Lords from Three Houses, as well as Micaiah and Altina from Radiant Dawn, also breaks a few old trends.
- Normally, each Summer banner features every movement type except armoured units, until Harmonized Summer Edelgard and Altina showed up, who is a sword armor.
- It also broke the pattern of having having a Duo Hero in one month and a Harmonized Hero the next, as this banner features a Harmonized Hero, which the prior Bridal banner also did.
- This is the first banner where every unit has an exclusive skill, ported over from their Legendary versions. note
- Past summer banners almost always featured female lords and heroines, with no male lords in sight, but this banner was the first summer banner to feature male lords, in this case Dimitri and Claude.
- Finally, the variants of Dimitri and Claude introduced in this banner are not a lance unit (for Dimitri) or a colorless archer (for Claude). Dimitri is instead an axe cavalier, while Claude is a blue dagger flier.
- The "Risk and Reward" banner in August 2022 featured the game's first fourth-tier B-skill in Chill Def/Res 3, when B-skills up to that point had previously avoided such upgrades unlike A and C-skills.
- The "Wyvern Ninja" banner featured Haar, who was released as a Grand Hero, as its Tempest Trial reward, making him the first character to have more than one variant as a grail unit.
- 2023's Valentine's banner, "A Special Gift", entirely does away with a parent and child being involved in the festivities. Fates' Takumi and Leo are themselves fathers, but they instead partake in the Day of Devotion with their younger sisters Sakura and Elise, who each have one retainer (Hana and Effie) tagging along. Effie as the reward unit for the respective Tempest Trials is also neither armored (ironically) or a cavalier unlike previous Valentine's Tempest Trials reward units, but Infantry.
- After the avatar characters Robin, Corrin, and Byleth only had their female variants gain Summer versions, Shez is the first avatar character to have a male Summer version, and have both genders have a Summer version.
- Summer Male Shez is also the first (and currently only) seasonal Tempest Trials+ reward unit with an exclusive weapon that is neither a young unit or a beast (both categories of which always get exclusive weapons).
- Halloween 2020 started a trend of exclusively dragon units and dragon-related characters being the summonable Heroes. 2023 ended it by bringing back human characters for that year's Halloween event.
- Ninja banner events tended to include characters that followed a certain original class theme, even if as ninja, they didn't necessarily use the weapon they were associated with. First it was Myrmidons (Lyn, Hana, Zihark, and Navarre), then it was Archers (Igrene, Shinon, and Shamir), and then Wyvern Riders (Camilla, Haar, Cherche, Heath, and Laegjarn). 2023's Ninja banner broke this trend, as all of the characters have vastly different original classes (Zelgius was a General, Heather a Rogue, Reina a Kinshi Knight, Sanaki an Empress, and Saizo a Ninja). Similarly, it is also the first ninja event to have a character who starts out as a ninja in his home game.
- The Winter 2023 banner is the first seasonal banner to not have a 4-star focus unit since the New Year's 2020 banner, which was also the last seasonal banner before the mechanic was introduced.
- The 2024 Spring banner, A Place To Rest, broke a couple trends:
- Every spring banner from 2018 to 2023 had a character originating from Macedon, but due to all of the Whitewings, Minerva, and her siblings getting Spring alts over the course of the previous six years, the trend came to an end with this banner.
- Sylvain from Three Houses was one of the featured characters, and he has an exclusive weapon, making him the first male unit on a Spring banner to have one, as the rest all have inheritable weapons instead.
- Mirabilis serves as the banner's demote, marking the first time a Book 4 OC has been available at a rarity below 5-star.
Legendary, Mythic, and Emblem Hero banners
- The November 2020 Mythic Hero banner of Triandra and Freyja is the first banner of Legendary/Mythic Hero banners to feature 2 new Legendary/Mythic Heroes instead of just 1, the first Legendary/Mythic Hero banner to last nearly 2 weeks long, and the first Legendary/Mythic Hero Battle to feature a Dual Boss.
- Legendary Lilina's banner from December 2020 is notable for two broken trends:
- This banner releases a red tome legendary hero, the first red legendary to not wield a sword.note
- Excluding Røkkr specials, this is the first time a banner introduces a new AOE special since 2017. In turn, it also happens to be the first one to be a Secret Art, as all other AOE specials until that point were inheritable.
- The November 2021 Hero banner of Eitri and Thórr broke a couple of trends:
- It is the first banner to introduce a Legendary Hero and a Mythic Hero at the same time, the second one to last 2 weeks long and have a Dual Boss following the above Mythic Hero banner, and the first one to feature a Legendary & Mythic Hero Battle instead of just a Legendary or Mythic Hero Battle.
- This banner is the first since November 2018 to release a Heroes-exclusive character as a Legendary Hero, as a majority of Heroes-exclusive characters released after Hríd are Mythic Heroes instead.
- Until the release of Legendary Female Shez, who is a dagger unit, every Legendary Hero released in the month of December had been a mage.
- The November 2023 Mythic Hero banner featuring Kvasir and Gullveig is the first banner with two new Legendaries/Mythics that are different colors.
- The first Legendary/Mythic banner of 2024, aside from introducing Emblem Heroes with Emblem Marth, featured Lumera, who had previously been introduced as a Grand Hero, as a Mythic Hero. This marks the first time a Mythic Hero is an alternate version of a character with the same identity as the character's base form.
Other
- Non-seasonal blue tomes were always associated with users of either Light or Thunder magic, until the release of Fallen Delthea with her darkness-based Death. Similarly, a year later, the once exclusively wind magic green tomes would come to include Fallen Lyon with his Blood Tome, also darkness based.
- Book IV Chapter 13's trailer displays the fourth map instead of the last map unlike the trailers of the prior chapters, to avoid Trailers Always Spoil. The actual last map of the chapter has the group finally back in the real world, greeted by Loki.
- Each Arc Villain up to Book V has been a green unit up until Embla from Book VI, who is a red unit instead. Additionally, her map battle theme is completely different than the other Arc Villain battle themes (which Letizia, the Big Bad Wannabe and Disc-One Final Boss of Book VI, has instead).
- Nifl and Múspell are the first dragon units that are not Infantry, Flying, or Armored, but Cavalry units instead.
- Prior to Book VI, Kozaki Yusuke was the main character artist for odd-numbered books while other artists did the even-numbered books. Book VI is the first even-numbered book to be done by Kozaki, while Book VII's characters went on to be illustrated by Yoshiku, who is also the first artist other than Kozaki to work on more than one book's character art.
- The winter unit that takes over the game's official Twitter accounts for the holidays was always a female Fódlan character ever since the trend started in 2019. However, 2022's guest host was the Black Knight from the Tellius games instead.
- Most of the heroes that receive Resplendent outfit and stats boosts since February 2019 have been heroes that can be summoned through Orbs, but Aversa's Resplendent in April 2023 breaks the trend by being the first Heroic Grail unit to receive one, and before the 24 other Grand Hero Battle units and 11 non-seasonal Tempest Trials units before her initial release.
- Ever since Christmas 2019, one of the Winter units took over the game's Twitter account; Sothis in 2019, Hilda in 2020, Lysithea & Lute in 2021, the Black Knight in 2022, and Yunaka in 2023, and when the unit's time on Twitter was up, they would give Summoning Tickets, with the exception of Yunaka, breaking the pattern.
