A Vicious Circle

So, I've been playing a bit of Conquest lately after it came out over here, and I noted some small nitpick about it.

First of all, I'm not really one for the general tactical playstyle on the overworld map. By that, I don't mean that I don't like tactics and strategy games, otherwise I wouldn't have picked up the game to begin with, but rather how the end results of the battle end up. If a guy is gone, he's gone permanently. That would of course not work at all with Conquest, but it's what I'm used to, and it takes some time to adapt to it.

Also, it takes quite some time to get some decent, high powered warriors in place. Being more used to RTS games, I can just pop down a building or three and crank out some high powered units and take the fight directly to the enemy. It doesn't work that way in turn based strategy, but even in Civ IV I got a different feeling than this, whereas this game focuses more on training your existing army and upgrading castles compared to simply building and fighting with it.

The recruitment of warriors isn't a system I particularly like. At the very least, you could have been able to choose where to deploy the recruited warrior when you recruited him/her, and not just when the kingdom is filled up. That causes annoying and unnecessary placements where you might not need them the most, and could leave you open to attack elsewhere where you might need them. Why you only can delegate them elsewhere when your castle is filled is beyond me, but I guess there is nothing to do about it, and rather adjust my defensive tactic after it.

Also, why am I being lectured every time I start up a scenario? I know how to use a gold mine already, just shut up and let me dig.

All that being said, Conquest is still a pretty fun game. The battles play well, playing strategy with pokémon is a good concept and I like how they managed to work around with it (pokémon works pretty well for turn based strategy, but I think it could have worked as an RTS as well, though I don't think the execution of this would have worked on a handheld). I think the artwork looks slick, and it's nice to see some different art on a lot of pokémon if you ask me. The music is okay, the overworld music gets a bit annoying after a while, but so do most of the other music in the pokémon games, so it's not something I think too much about. I'm in love with the Pugillis music, one of the best fitting pieces of music in any pokémon game ever, it just spurs me on every time. Speaking about the castles, I think that the general level design is good, some of the trap placements are pretty obvious, but they do the trick, and it's always fun to incorporate them into the general strategy of the battle. Ransei itself is just big enough, with too many individual castles, changing months would be a long, dull affair, but with the amount in Conquest it's acceptable.

Conquest is by far an entertaining game, and I'm going to keep playing it for a while, at least until BW2 comes by this fall. I haven't played too many spin offs, but I find this as entertaining as any main game, especially with the amount of extra scenarios. The main series games have a lot to learn from that, the game fully starts post game, ironically (not that I think the main series game could ever deliver this amount of scenarios, but some more actual content and less mindless exploring and catching pokémon would be appreciated). I'm also glad I spent enough time mindlesly training in the main story and Oichi's story, creating the backbone of my army, certainly in the all female (lol, Ranmaru) scenarios, where I suddenly start of with a Haxorus. Yup, rape time.