What is Pokémon Conquest?

Pokémon Conquest, known in Japan as Pokémon + Nobunaga's Ambition, is a tactical role-playing game developed by Tecmo Koei, revealed at Jump Festa on December 17, 2011 and released in Japan on March 17, 2012 and in North America on June 18, 2012. It crosses Pokémon with Koei's long-running Nobunaga's Ambition strategy series, a pairing that happened, by the developers' own account, because The Pokémon Company's Tsunekazu Ishihara loved Nobunaga's Ambition and Koei's Kou Shibusawa loved Pokémon.

The setting is Ransei, a region shaped like feudal Japan and divided into 17 kingdoms, one per Pokémon type, a number chosen because the original Nobunaga's Ambition had featured 17 provinces. Historical warlords, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Akechi Mitsuhide and their retinues, fight as characters in a Sengoku war, each bonded to partner Pokémon, Nobunaga to Hydreigon and, at his full power, Zekrom. You play a young warlord with an Eevee, uniting the kingdoms against Nobunaga's plan to use the creator Pokémon of Ransei's legend, Arceus, to unmake the region.

Battles are small grid wars, six Pokémon a side on terrain that matters, and the design is Conquest's own: each Pokémon fights with a single signature move, and a warrior's strength with a Pokémon is a link percentage, a bond that grows by fighting together and caps higher for the partner a warlord was born to command. Two hundred Pokémon from the first five generations fill the kingdoms.

The West dropped Nobunaga's name from the title, which hides what the game is: a genuine entry in a serious Japanese strategy series, wearing Pokémon as its cast. It sold 1.02 million copies, never received a sequel, and remains the DS era's great one-off.