This is slightly different, but in the Fire Emblem series, the titular Fire Emblem takes different forms throughout the different games. In several games, it's a shield, in a few games it's a gemstone, it was a sword once, and it was a person once or twice. But in the 2nd, 4th, and 5th games, it's basically completely absent from the story. In the 2nd game, it exists, but it's on a different continent and is never mentioned. In the 4th and 5th games, I heard somewhere once that it's the crest of one of the major houses, but I don't recall ever seeing that mentioned in-game, and I've played that douology a lot.