I beat another game already! Crazy. This one was Pokemon Conquest, a game I have been meaning to play for years but just never got around to. As someone who has really enjoyed the side games over the years like PMD, Colo/XD, and even Ranger back in the day I was excited to try this one out. Never played a Nobunaga’s Ambition game before (tbh I still don’t know much about the series at all), but I heard it was essentially Fire Emblem with Pokemon, all wrapped up in a feudal Japan coating so I was like hey, let’s go for it. I love Fire Emblem, I love Pokemon, know nothing about feudal Japan but that’s okay.
I had a fun time with the game overall! Like I said, Fire Emblem-esque gameplay and Pokemon was something I was super excited for and it mostly delivered. I do think it fell a little flat in some places but it was mostly good. The strategy elements were there and hit on pretty well, it just didn’t feel as fleshed out as I wanted it to at times. For example, I’m used to Pokemon having four moves so only being limited to one with no “coverage option” felt limiting. Like yes, my Jolteon is more useless against Ground-types than normal because it literally only has Thunderbolt. I thought the Warrior skills were nice though, even if some of them were essentially the same with a different name (I’m thinking all the attack/defense booster ones). It added some variety.
Speaking of variety, it was very cool to see some Pokemon that I’ve hardly thought about actually be good. Like there was a Simipour on my team for the final main story battle, and Carnivine put in work through the early/midgame. I tried to use a varied team for the story battles as much as I could, since your starter Eevee/Eeveelution and sidekick’s Jigglypuff are required for story battles. It gives you four slots to play with, and even the good stuff that you get for pretty little investment (namely Rhyperior and Gallade) aren’t always the correct choices.
I also liked the variety in the battlefields in each typed kingdom overall. Some were pretty cool, like the Fighting-type kingdom having a ring that you could push opponents out of and have a king of the hill style kind of battle in. Some were annoying, like Dark having a roulette that teleports you or the opponent away or Ice having ice physics (who thought that was a good idea??) but overall I liked the variety. As for objectives, most were just defeat all opponents, the next most common was claiming all banners. The only one that stuck out really was the Fighting type one since it was “hold all banners for five turns” which combined with the style of the battleground made for a neat experience. Wish there was a little more variety there but overall pretty good.
I also don’t really know if I was playing the game “correctly” tbh, like I would do a story battle every chance I could with my two MCs and a squad to fill out the rest of the slots. But it seems like you’re meant to take your time a bit more. In the early/midgame I went out of my way to recruit new team members which was fun for awhile, but once I hit a certain point everything I could recruit wasn’t going to be any stronger than anything already had, so by the late game I basically just did story battles which made the game fly by. I didn’t find the shops too useful, I had a surplus of gold and spent it on a few items that I would just rotate between whichever six Pokemon I was using in the latest story battle. I was looking for evolution stones (especially a Moon Stone for Jigglypuff since that was story required) but didn’t find any. Maybe I just missed them. I did google it though and apparently a “traveling merchant” shows up sometimes but maybe I beat the game too fast before I got the luck for them to show up. As I said the gameplay loop of story battle then recruit new warriors/mons to your side was fun at first but seemed like kind of a waste of time after.
Actually speaking of, the way you get new Pokemon is kind of interesting. You have to defeat warriors in four turns or less in the side battles to recruit them, or you can “link” with wild Pokemon to recruit them as well. Defeating the warriors is simple enough if you bring the right team. Linking with the wild Pokemon is a bit different in that you basically play a little rhythm game with them (you just tap A in time with the balls of light that come across the screen like you would in guitar hero). But as I mentioned after the very start of the game to maybe the midgame it didn’t seem worth it. Would’ve liked to have recruited some of the other warlords outside the ones the story gives you, but despite beating them in four turns or less I could never get them on my side. I heard this is because you need the MC present during these battles but I always had him doing story battles. Wish this was made clearer.
Now for the story… it was fine. Nothing too crazy going on here. You go around invading other kingdoms and once you take them over you move on to the next set. I was only invaded myself one time… I think if you take too long to invade kingdoms they probably invade you but the one time I was invaded it seemed like it was a required story thing so after that I sped up the pace to avoid being caught off guard and losing a battle. I think my biggest criticism is that right near the beginning there are these kind of random kid characters that show up and it seems like they’re going to be important to the story but… they kind of just show up to annoy you once every like four battles and don’t really make a difference. But they’re there in the end credits? I don’t know, at least the final battle (part 1 and part 2) was cool, even if how Nobunaga managed to get a Zekrom and a (REDACTED) wasn’t really explained at all.
Apparently there is a very lengthy postgame. I haven’t touched it yet. I’ll probably explore it at least a little bit but there looks like there’s more than double the content of the main story in the postgame. I wish they could’ve added this stuff into the main story because after I see credits roll I’m less inclined to do other stuff. But maybe it’s stuff that would truly only work outside the main story. We’ll see… speaking of the main story took me 13 hours to complete. I was really thorough with recruiting in the early stages though so if you wanted to breeze through in maybe 10 hours you probably could.
Overall I liked Pokemon Conquest. I didn’t like it as much as any Fire Emblem game I’ve played, but I did like it better than some Pokemon side games that I’ve played. Will I try another game in the Nobunaga’s Ambition series? Probably not. But will I explore the postgame at least a bit in Conquest? Definitely yes. I’m just happy I got this game for cheap instead of paying the full price for it, because the main story content isn’t much before credits roll. Like I said though maybe the postgame will have more to offer.
(almost) Final Verdict: 6.5/10 (maybe a 7 if the postgame ends up being really good)
