Some time ago I had hacked an old 3DS. It’s a great emulator platform since it can easily play games from the Gameboy through to the GBA, DS and 3DS. But for some reason often when you complete these kinds of little projects you just go, “Wow, now it can play anything!” and then promptly set it aside. But enough time has passed I recently picked it up and have been playing through some old DS/3DS greatest hits and hidden gems. Because of the unique hardware affordances of the DS (two screens, one of them utilizing a stylus), it’s hard to properly emulate, so there’s a great library of games there that I haven’t had much exposure to before. The game that’s really hooked me doesn’t necessarily use those unique affordances much, but it’s nonetheless one I had never heard of, probably because of how siloed a platform it is.
And that’s Pokémon Conquest (2012), a Pokémon-themed tactics game set in Sengoku-era Japan. I’ve been playing a ton of it, and there’s a couple interesting bits of design I’ve been thinking about.
(Getting screenshots off my 3DS is a chore, so here’s some courtesy of Moby Games)
Nobunaga’s Pokémon
It seems like the game was a minor side project for Tecmo Koei’s Omega Force dev team, who normally work on the Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors franchises. It’s a licensed spinoff game, and parts of it seem pretty rushed. It’s not necessarily a great game, but I found it hard to put down nonetheless, and it’s doing some interesting things.
The Japanese title, “Pokémon + Nobunaga’s Ambition”, is much more explanatory of what the game is. But it’s really more of a Nobunaga’s Ambition themed game than a mashup. That is, it takes NA’s Sengoku setting, and huge cast of historical characters.
But even just that theming is fun and fresh enough. The whole game’s cast are all real people who actually existed, rendered into strange Pokémon-y caricatures of themselves. It just so happened that my partner and I started watching Shōgun as I was playing this, and I really enjoyed the jarringly different adaptations of the same source historical material.
Besides the setting though, it’s not very much like Nobunaga Ambition. There’s no grand strategy gameplay like provincial management or complex diplomacy. Instead, instead it’s grid based tactics a la Final Fantasy Tactics or Advance Wars. It’s a great fit, the grid-based tactics really livens up Pokémon combat, which is ordinarily a very Wizardry-style menu-based system. It even has some neat flourishes, though underexplored, like push mechanics and positioning that prefigure Into The Breach‘s gameplay.
Two things I found myself thinking about while playing were Pokémon’s byzantine type system, and Conquest’s unique progression macrosystems.
Appreciation for the Pokémon Type System
But the game really made me appreciate the potential of Pokémon’s overloaded type system. I replayed the Gen I and II games a few years ago, and you need to think about your party’s type coverage. But this a Gen V era game, and with much fiddlier matchups, so it brings it more into focus. And wow, the type system is just so ungainly. It’s very much a system that was designed in 1995 and has been added to, but never fundamentally reworked. So it has all these weird legacy choices baked in, like having “Fire” and “Ice” elements alongside not-elements like “Flying” or “Fighting”, and weird overlaps like “Ground” and “Rock”.
Elemental strength/weakness systems tend to be pretty neat and organized. When I think about these systems, the first ones that spring to mind are simple rock-paper-scissor relations, like Final Fantasy XI‘s, or Kingdom of Loathing‘s. Clean, consistent, and easy to remember:
Compare that clean simplicity with Pokémon’s system of seventeen elements, too many to graph legibly. It’s such a snarled mess that it requires elaborate charts like this:
You can’t keep this whole thing in your head, and even after playing for 40 or 60 hours, I had to continually doublecheck things against charts like this (or the in-game documentation thereof, bizarrely hidden in the submenu that you search for warriors on).
But, the shaggy dog nature of the system is also a strength! Elegant and perfectly balanced systems are also a bit boring. Early on in most Pokémons (including this one), you’ll learn that Fire beats Grass, and Grass beats Water, and Water beats Fire. A nice and familiar rock-paper-scissor (or more properly, sansukumi-ken) sort of setup. But then you add in, say, Electric, which beats Water, and is ineffective against Grass but not weak to it, and it can’t damage Ground at all, and suddenly we have a much more complex set of relationships going on.
Asymmetry of Strong Against/Weak To: Most of the relationships are like the Water, Fire, Grass triode. Each element does double damage against what it’s strong to, and in turn takes double damage from what it’s weak to. But it turns out those are six relations, not three. Because Pokémon actually separately tracks ‘strong against’ and ‘weak to’. Like I mentioned before, an Electric attack is ineffective against a Grass type, but a Grass attack does not do double damage against Electric types. This creates a more nuanced set of relationships to track than just “kills X, is killed by Y”. In graph theory terms, most type systems are undirected graphs, or simpler directed graphs. But this is a bidirected graph with two relations between each type, not one.
Dual-Types on Defense: That asymmetry is possible because the attack itself has an element, separate from the attacker’s type and the defender type. While an attack is always of a single element, Pokémon can have up to two types. Dual-typed Pokémon inherit and stack their types strengths and weaknesses. So dual-types exacerbate weaknesses, like a Water/Ground type takes quadruple damage from Grass, instead of just double. But duals can also cancel out weaknesses, like the Electric/Flying Emolga, Ground Pokémon will be immune to its Electric attacks, but, Ground attacks deal no damage to Flying Pokémon, so you’d instead need to use something from Flying’s other weaknesses (like Ice or Rock).
This makes the system even more fiddly, and and a great many of the Pokémon you have to choose from in Pokémon Conquest are dual-typed. That’s why I said I needed to always be looking up charts plural before, showing all the dual-type matchups requires eighteen sets of charts to show it all.
Complexity Can Be Good for Tactics!
All of this is great in a grid-based tactics game like this. Typically, if a tactics game has a type system it might be unit type, like Cavalry beat Archers, Spearmen beat Cavalry, yadda yadda. But of course these are just an “Elemental Strengths/Weaknesses System” by another name (or vice versa). In fact, the matchups for units in Age of Empires III is exactly isomorphic to KoL’s elements system, and that isn’t uncommon.
With a handful of types like this, there’s only so many permutations thereof. Such systems tend to not accommodate multi-types either (are Horse Archers weak to Cavalry and Spearmen?). And they rarely split attack and defense as separate effective/ineffective relationships. And that’s totally fine when the strategic complexity is coming from somewhere else in the game’s systems, but can lead to overly simple gameplay. I think a lot of Advance Wars clones (and a bunch of the actual Advance Wars) face this issue, leading gameplay to devolve into a maneuvering race of being able to attack first with with a favorable match-up (cf. Keith Burgun’s problems in turn-based tactics).
And, yeah, that happens in Pokémon Conquest too. But often enough, you’ll be facing an opposing army that is so diversely typed that you won’t have clean answers available in your own army, which leads to complicated thinking (and chart consulting). You might need to manage having an enemy or two you won’t be able to deal with easily, or need to take positioning very carefully into account to prevent a particular matchup that’d be unfavorable.
(These are actually screenshots from a mod, but you get the idea)
There’s more to the combat, like there’s status effects, temporary buffs and debuffs, and positioning matters because most attacks hit only very specific tiles. Yadda yadda. But all those other systems are enriched by the overly complex and inelegant type system. And I think there’s a good lesson there! Sometimes a shaggy design can actually be better than an elegant one. A little bit of messiness adds funny little knots that the player then needs to unwind.
To Be Continued
I have a whole other thing I wanted to talk about, but I feel like this has already gotten long enough. So I’ll split that off into another post, stay tuned!
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