Gamer Recognizes Game: 'Pokémon Conquest'

Pokémon is one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time — with all sorts of physical and mobile releases over the years. Most things stay the same across the mainline of Pokémon games, being the physical releases of Generation 1 through Generation 9. The only real changes are quality-of-life improvements or bug fixes.

The spin-off games, on the other hand, are off the wall.

From pinball to sleep to friendship loops, Pokémon has thrown many random elements into its core concepts to make new games. A lot of these spin-off games are beloved by many diehard fans.

For casual fans, however, the accessibility and replayability of some spin-off games can make for a less enjoyable experience — with some fans not even picking up the games altogether.  

There are a few spin-off games that strike a perfect balance between the two sets of fans, but one in particular stands out to me: “Pokémon Conquest.”

Every time I return to this game — which was released in 2012 — I admire how simple and deep it is.

The game itself is a combination of Pokémon's creatures and battling with the characters and battle mechanics of the Nobunaga's Ambition franchise — a turn-based strategy game popular largely in Japan. “Pokémon Conquest” takes concepts from both franchises and directs the player to unify the Ransei region by engaging in battles with Pokémon who are led by different warlords and warriors.

The region is made up of 17 kingdoms, which are themed around the 17 Pokémon types that existed at the time of this game's release.

The game features 200 unique warlords and warriors, as well as 200 Pokémon. This total number of Pokémon was brought down from the 500+ that existed in the mainline games at the time to avoid overwhelming players.

As mentioned earlier, the core mechanics of Pokémon battles are still present in this game, with only a few mechanics being changed from the usual.

Fights for kingdoms take place on a tile-based map where you move your Pokémon around with set objectives to complete within a certain number of turns. Each map is unique to each kingdom, and is themed around the same theme as the kingdom itself.

The major core mechanic that was changed — and expanded upon — was the catching. You don't lower a Pokémon's health to catch it — like you would in the old games — but instead move to an adjacent tile and play a timing-based minigame to attempt to catch the Pokémon in one or multiple turns by building a link.

Links are a new mechanic that replaced levels, with links increasing through battle and other interactions in the game. Links serve to determine the attack, defense, and health of your Pokémon, as levels did in the main games. Both levels and links operate on a scale of 1 to 100, with links being represented as percentages.

Where they differentiate from levels is that not every Pokémon can reach level 100 — or what is referred to in this game as a “perfect link” — with every warlord. Each warlord and warrior has a specific Pokémon they can get a perfect link with — with the potential strength of other Pokémon they can link with capping at certain levels.

These features and changes are well explained through the initial tutorial, which walks you through the beginning of the game by slowly opening the map and guiding your decisions. This is a justified story decision, explained to the player by the character being the new warlord of a kingdom. This helps the process feel less like your hand is being held or that the start of the game is slow.

Once you complete the first chapter, the rest of the game and its opportunities open up to you. There is a "final story" that unlocks after completing around half of the available stories in the game, and there is never really any pressure or requirement to catch every Pokémon, pair every warrior with a perfect link, or complete every story.

However, the amount of replayability gained by making that choice to find every Pokémon, pair each warrior and warlord with their perfect link and complete every story takes the game from being maybe a 20 or 30 hour experience to potentially hundreds of hours of gameplay. That amount of solid replayability within a spin-off game is impressive and it's what keeps me coming back to play “Pokémon Conquest” over and over.

I haven't finished all the stories yet because I'm still taking my time working through the game. As of right now, I have logged close to 300 hours playing it — and I probably still have a couple hundred more hours to put into it before I am fully finished with it.

To me, that depth is what makes “Pokémon Conquest” so incredible. I could have been done with it a hundred hours faster, but here I am still playing it.

To have that much content with mechanics so similar to the mainline Pokémon games while also adding so much onto them makes “Pokémon Conquest” one of my all-time favorite games, and one I highly recommend to anyone who has read this far.