Pokémon is probably one of the franchises with the most spin-offs ever. Conquest is Pokémon’s attempt at the strategy RPG genre, and while I like it, I fear that may be for the wrong reasons.

Visually, it’s pleasant. It’s a DS game, so you know there won’t be any mindblowing effects, but it uses more detailed sprites than the 4th gen games. Stages are functional, with miniature, 2D sprites in a 3D scene, as is somewhat standard for SRPGs, and while the soundtrack isn't outstanding, there's some pretty good tracks in there, like Nixtorm and Aurora themes.

The game’s setting is loosely based on Japan from the Edo Period, when the country went through the process of unification influenced by Nobunaga Oda. In fact, Nobunaga is the main antagonist, and every single character in the game is named after someone connected to him in some way. Bulbapedia keeps a list of those, if you're interested.

The game, or at least the first campaign, goes something like this: Your character is the ruler of one of seventeen kingdoms, and you must conquer all of them before Nobunaga does, while befriending both pokémon and warriors. It’s kind of like what you do in Pokémon Masters, if you played that: beat the Gym leader and they join you.

The dialogues are hilarious, what you should expect from taking a dark plot about the bloody conquest of nations by a fierce warlord and rewrite it to be suitable for children. Right after your first major battle, a character casually says something along the lines of “Greenleaf and Fontaine are peaceful nations, they’re not planning to go to war with anyone. You should invade them!”. Just like that. So if you’re looking for deep plots and nuanced characters, you’re in the wrong place.

Which then takes us to the gameplay. How does Conquest fare as an SRPG? Not that well, I'm afraid. As far as strategy games go, it’s entry level at best, having a relatively low difficulty level and being based on simple, rather shallow mechanics.

You bring into battle a team of six warriors, each of which can only optimally use one Pokémon family and whose placement in the field is outside of your control. Each Pokémon has only one move, of either of its types, and also a set of traits, which are almost always luck-based effects.

There are some mechanics, like Warrior Skills, that attempt to bring some depth to battles, but apart from one grossly overpowered case (Sweet Song), those will hardly make a difference. Several stages also have environmental twists, but again, unit starting positions are random, so you won't get to plan around those.

Ultimately, Conquest is about overpowering enemies with brute force, which makes for a pretty poor strategy game experience. Which is why, a couple dozen hours in, I realized Conquest was a much better game if I thought of it as a turn-based RPG instead, because of how the Pokémon license lends itself to the gameplay.

That’s pretty much why I spent so much time playing it. It’s fun to recruit warriors, match them to their perfect link, evolve their pokémon, then do the same in the next of the many campaigns (since they carry over). It's as if the game was just a run-of-the-mill mainline release.

Of course, even then, there are some issues. The game overstays its welcome by a lot -- yes, the multiple campaigns have fun twists, but there's also so much padding, so much grinding, and so much of the enemy AI wasting your time. Not to mention, there is so much missable or hard to find crap. By the time I completed the game, it was more about the sunken cost fallacy and the feeling of obligation to see it to the end than actual engagement.

And that's Pokémon Conquest. It's a mediocre strategy game that has no reason to be relevant other than its license, but it does make good use of that license. It's worth checking out for those who are deep into the Pokémon series and are looking for something a little bit different.