Pokemon Conquest

[Tev]

So, after having missed out on getting my hands on this game a year or so ago, I managed to have it gifted to me this Christmas by my loving fiance who knows well my twin loves for Pokemon and Final Fantasy Tactics style games.

I don't remember much talk about this version of Pokemon before it was overshadowed by White and Black, more White and Black, and then X and Y. I have to say however, that feudal Japan Pokemon wars are pretty awesome.

Did any of the rest of you give this game a try? Unless there is some serious Game+/replay content, I think this is going to be a short game. There are twelve Kingdoms that need conquering and after a few days, I'm already knocking on the doors to Kingdoms 8, 9, 10, and 11. I'm not entirely pleased that my attack teams are forced to consist of two Normal-Type mons (Eevee and Jigglypuff) though I think I can have my two "Leaders" link up with other Pokemon, though I haven't found any that are ideal link candidates. I'm not sure what the point of money in this game is. I keep earning it, but there's really never anything worth spending it on. I also keep getting items that supposedly can be combined into other items, but I've not had a tutorial on how to actually accomplish that yet.

All in all, I've been having fun, but I feel like I'm missing out on some interesting gameplay choices because the game hasn't explained them to me. I spent the first couple of days in fear that the warlords in the other towns would come and try to take back all of these castles that I've been conquering, but it turns out that they just wait for you to come to them, which is sad.

[Aldurin]

I tried it, but quickly lost interest when the normal depth and variance inherent to the franchise was absent here. You chose pokemon from whatever small amount you were given to add to your army and there was more or less no distinction between same-type pokemon since the moves system was dumbed down. It's a shortcoming similar to Mystery Dungeon's somewhat awkward adaptation to a dungeon-crawler, but far worse since there isn't really much that stops the Conquest system into being easily reskinned into a better adaptation for a different franchise that has a similar simplicity.

Third-party games have just been in a slump for Pokemon. Ranger was an odd simulator for drilling circles into your touch screen, Mystery Dungeon is still not sure how to properly balance its dedication to the original pokemon mechanics and making a good dungeon crawler (though still the best of the spinoffs in recent memory).

But once we get Pokemon Umbral into a published game then all of that will change [evil laughter].

[Azisien]

Game lacked depth. If it had been more EXACTLY like FFT's depth, it would have been the game of the year.

[akaSM]

I really wanted to get this game but, it has a very small selection of pokémon, and my favorite pokémon isn't one of those ;-;

[Tev]

I think I'm almost to the end of the game (2 kingdoms left plus whatever "after-game" there is). Overall it's not terrible. Azisien is right, if it had the tactical depth of FFT then it would be a game that I'd almost surely never let go of. I'm not too broken up over the pokemon selection. It's a pretty diverse mix from most of the generations.

I am a little bit sad that It seems as though my main character and his girlfriend seem to only be link compatible with normal-type pokemon, and so, besides the starting Eevee that I could change at some point, I'm pretty much saddled with two normal-type pokemon on my team every time I want to go conquer a kingdom. This has made my fights against the Ghost-type kingdom pretty one-sided against me. At some point I'm just going to break down and have Bulbapedia or Serebii show me all the things I've been doing wrong. Though I may save that for the second play-through.

[Yumil]

Originally Posted by Tev

I think I'm almost to the end of the game (2 kingdoms left plus whatever "after-game" there is).

There's a lot. Like ~30 mini stories.

[Tev]

Yeah, I broke into the after-game over the weekend. It's actually a little bit harder than I expected it to be. I accidentally let the kingdom that specialized in electric Pokemon to gain too much of a foothold and their map is a pain in the butt to fight in. They can't really expand at all because I have them surrounded with kingdoms full of rock/ground-type Pokemon, but I just can't seem to kick them out. Like I said, their battle map is a pain to navigate and all of my rock Pokemon are either inordinately slow and/or have stupid ranged attacks that almost never hit the much faster electric types (though if they do manage to hit, it's a pile of damage).

Right now I'm just sort of wrecking the rest of the island and planning on coming back to them later.