So I've recently tried to get into the Fire Emblem series, and I've started with Fire-Emblem and the Sacred Stones

would someone mind explaining the appeal of this series?

see, I'm an advlt here, I don't have much time for video-games anymore, and I've also long since outgrown the habit of letting a video-game actually make me angry.
yet...
somehow, this damn time-sink has managed to drag me back ten years in maturity and I've found myself really wondering how it is that this series is so popular.

from what I gather the game functions off of what the devs. call the Random Number Generator, or RNG. It's pretty much a random dice roller that you'd fine in any other RPG.
but it's not...
from what I can tell this thing is so sporadic, unpredictable and down-right broken at times that it seems to render the entire game pointless. What's the point of leveling a unit? why bother being strategic? Every FE player has about a dozen stories of some really powerful unit of theirs having a 99% hit chance and high critical rating, and then missing multiple times because of this arbitrary RNG. On the flip side they also have dozens of stories of completely mundane enemies taking down said powerful unit even though it had a low hit or critical rating.

All I can figure is that it must satisfy some primal gambling itch, because that's what this game feels like to me: gambling. One does not get good at Fire Emblem, one simply sits there, restarts the chapter, sits there, restarts the chapter, until, by sheer chance, they manage to beat it with all of their units in tact.

in any rate, is there something I'm missing? because as nonsensical as the game may be, I find myself strangely addicted to it, but my patience can only go so far before I finally conclude that a game, even a classic, is just not my cup of tea.

feel free to post some FE stories of your own if anyone's interested.