Something's not right here. I know for a fact that I'm completely off-base, but I can't help but feel that there's some racial undertone to whatever discussion about this game I'm going to start. I can't even explain the premise with "Nobunaga met Pokemon in a bar", because I know the horrible directions where that would immediately go. Suffice it to say that this is a mash-up of a series about magical cockfights and a series about a fighting cock (presumably magical in nature). Wacky, right? Surprisingly, not in the slightest. Turns out that these two series fit perfectly with each other.

Take, for example, the central premise: conquer all of Hokkaid-er, Ransei, using the power of your Flareon. Again, the premise sounds weird, but let's put some thought into it. What would be the first thing you'd do if you discovered a...whatever the shitting hell this is...that could shoot lightning out its butt? That's right! "Conquer all of Japan"! It makes even more sense when you factor in how you only fight Pokemon, and never once a trainer. What this means is that every soldier in Japan would rather surrender immediately instead of face off against Kadabra. (Not that they're wrong or anything.) Well, except for the cartoonishly evil Nobunaga (who refers to himself in the third person for no real reason). I could regale you with his life story and how Japan perceives him, but all I have to say is this: his entire motivation in the game is to summon the Pokemon equivalent of God so that he can kill it on the spot...OK, I should probably admit that the story does have its share of silliness. Endearing silliness, but silliness nonetheless.

The gameplay, however, is anything but silly. In fact, it's pretty much Tactics Ogre with Pokemon. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Tactics Ogre was always good for a quick burst of fighting, and throwing Pokemon and a Nintendo DS into the mix just amplifies all that. Well, except for the tactics part, oddly enough. I know, right? You have about 20 different elemental alignments or whatever interacting like crazy, and twice as many ranges to worry about, so you'd think that a lot of thought would go into how you approach these battles. For the most part, that isn't the case. True, there are some challenging fights, like when you actually take on Nobunaga, but for the most part, the game does a lot of the thinking for you. It straight-up tells you what Pokemon to bring into the more important battles, and for the most part, I could power through a lot of those missions with the mighty power of my Vaporeon. Granted, the leading might be a bit necessary, given all those types I mentioned earlier, but I haven't played Pokemon in a while, and I was largely able to intuit what types would work on my own. It's hard to take the "conquest" part of the title seriously when conquesting is made so easy for you, and the casual attitude your opponents take toward being conquered certainly doesn't help things.

Fortunately, Nobunaga's here to save the day. Suck on that, popular Japanese perceptions of history! What I mean by this is that Nobunaga carries the game. All the faults I mentioned before aren't present when managing your kingdomly affairs. (This even includes problems I didn't mention, like iffy touch screen controls or how odd older Pokemon sound alongside their newer counterparts.) You can't ignore what your enemies are doing in the grand scheme of things. You try that shit, and they will invade your more vulnerable kingdoms and raze them to the ground. If you want to conquer all of Japan properly, you have to pay attention to what's going on in your castles. I'm not even limiting this to simply defense; some of the better trainers in the game only appear at just the right time, so that's another thing to watch out for. These two things may sound like a lot to manage (or at least they did to me; I don't know what comes after two), but Conquest maintains a casual enough pace to ease you into all this, along with a few other concepts. Hooray for achieving a perfect balance between strategy and accessibility!

If anything, I'd say the only problem with all of this is how easy it is to ignore it. Don't want to manage all those kingdoms? Want to stick with one-ish team of ultra powerful, god-like badasses? Just delegate control of your kingdoms to other warlords. That way, you don't have to worry about doing anything with all those kingdoms you conquered. I get why this is here: clicking through all your kingdoms can get tiring after a while. But aren't I supposed to play this on the go? I'm not going to sit down and blast through the whole game in prolonged sessions (except that's exactly what I did), so there's some wiggle room to let me search out trainers and Pokemon on my own. And it's not like the game has much outside what I've described. There aren't any sidequests or anything to pursue, at least not until the main story line's over. Then again, you have to put in an effort to ignore these better portions of the game, even if it is a tiny effort. If you go out of your way to ignore the more strategic parts of this strategy game, you deserve everything that comes your way. It may not be a lot, but you still deserve such a pittance.

Review Synopsis

• The strange thing about this is how accurate a representation of Japanese history it is (assuming a Japanese history populated with thunder cats).
• The best parts of this game are the ones where Nobunaga threatens to destroy God.
• That probably explains why the Pokemon elements are kinda lacking.

Speaking of strategy RPGs, I really hope that Pokemon Conquest has an exploit similar to this:

Fun fact: this was originally going to be a TurboGrafx-16 ninja game or whatever. Unfortunately, I couldn't remember if said game existed, and there aren't a lot of other games I could reasonably pair with Pokemon Conquest, so this time, I'm stuck with Japanese history through the very thick filter of Yu-Gi-Oh. Now any attentive readers in this blog will point out that I've already made that joke (although they oddly won't be attentive enough to read the rest of this blog), and they would be correct. In fact, I've already covered a Kishin Douji Zenki game in the past. Try to imagine that game with less random cinematic fights and more cinematics in general, and you have a good idea of what to expect from Batoru Gaiden.

Just don't expect any more Yu-Gi-Oh jokes from this game, because the cute, almost chibi look from last time is gone. Yea, sometimes Zenki turns into a little person for reasons I can't understand, but for the most part, you're a twelve-foot-tall hulking mess of...the exact same thing. I kid, of course. Yea, the transformation doesn't do much of anything, but damn if I don't look good after it. In fact, that's probably the one thing the game has going for it: graphics. Not so much the actual gameplay. I mean, the sprites have enough detail and color and everything, but they can't compare to the anime cutscenes. Yes, this is an SNES game with anime cutscenes. No, they don't animate, but they don't need to. The clean lines and vibrant color and all the other anime features make up for it. The only odd thing about it is how little story there is to justify these scenes. There's an evil mountain: kill it with your magic anime summoning powers. There may be more story than that, but it's hard to pay attention when you're punching literal bugbears in the gut. Why put so much effort into the cinematics when you're not going to tell a decent story with them?

I'll tell you why: because the game's so much flash that I think you can find it on addictinggames.com. Take, for example, the level design....You know, I probably should have explained somewhere that this is a platformer action game thing. I'd say you jump through levels, probably because some levels employ jumping fairly well (the final level being a good example), but for the most part, you're just walking forward. Sounds kinda boring, right? It is. It's not bad, though; pressing right will take you right, and jumping works well enough. It's just predictably boring. I thought that there might be some levels that make marching forward fun, but I am now convinced that I was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. I mistook "being made to walk left so I could beat up a key to get through the rest of the level" and "getting to punch enemies" as acts of kindness.

However, that does bring me to one of the game's stronger aspects: graphics combat. That's right. Combat. It may not look it at first, since you begin the game as tiny Zenki, but give it time. Eventually, you'll gain access to all sorts of cool moves. Magical uppercuts! Pitifully useless charge attacks! Some other thing! I'd say this lends the combat some depth, but unfortunately, you don't need to know a lot of that, as a good jump kick is enough to stagger any enemy to death. The only exception seems to be about half the bosses, who require you to spam some other move or whatnot. This one I'm pinning on me, though. I mean, I told you how many moves I had at my disposal, right? Something above two? Double two? It's probably my fault that I didn't make full use of my arsenal. However, I'm still blaming the game for poor level design and empty cinematics coming together in such an average product. I'd tell you to play Denei Raibu instead, but that's assuming a lot of things, like that you'd ever consider playing anything I blog about in the first place.

Review Synopsis

• Why is a demon prince playfully licking his hand? The world may never know.
• Kung Fu Master had more meaningful level variety than this game does.
• Although strangely enough, not as much in the way of punching dudes.