So like I was saying last time, I’ve been playing a lot of the old DS game Pokémon Conquest (2012), and appreciating some unique aspects of its design. Before I was talking about how Pokémon’s shaggy type system lends some interesting complexity to grid-based tactics gameplay. But even so, while I think it’s interesting, I don’t think Conquest is necessarily exemplary as a tactics game, especially if help up against other DS tactics games, like Advance Wars: Dual Strike (2005). Instead, what I was most surprised by wasn’t the tactics gameplay, but the game’s overarching progression systems. I want to try and describe those a bit, and why I think they’re pretty neat.
Macrosystem Design
I think I’m less interested in moment-to-moment gameplay than many game designers. I mean that low level strata of gameplay where the ‘main mechanics’ of a game are. It’s all well and good, and you could spend the rest of your life designing and iterating on new mechanics. But for me, with games I’m playing or working on or thinking about, I find I’m often bouncing off or being drawn in not by the main primary mechanics of the moment-to-moment gameplay, but by the superstructure of systems above that atomic level of gameplay.
To use some rough terminology here, we could say that a game has mechanics, and then systems that serve as containers for interesting instances of those mechanics. A “level” is often just such a container, and exists to serve up interesting permutations of the underlying mechanics for the player interact with. A game doesn’t necessarily need any elaborate superstructural systems (your typical sudoku app just generates afresh new sudoku puzzles, for instance), or need to have them encoded directly in the rules (a chess tournament is a sort of ‘campaign’, say, but that structure exists outside the game’s rules). But I often find that overly familiar (or even bad and unfun!) mechanics can be greatly elevated via a well designed superstructure, and conversely, even very fun mechanics can quickly wear thin without those contextual superstructures.
So, there are rules that determine the main gameplay, and those rules are themselves a system. That system is in turn part of a higher order one for, say, the levels. Which are themselves part of a system that links those levels together. In that rough hierarchy, levels function as interesting permutations for the mechanics to explore (“On this floor, there are two shield guys”), and ‘level design’ is the design of such systems. One level up from that is a concerned with how are the levels themselves linked together. I want to talk about that last bit, the systems concerned with serving up levels in an interesting way.
Conquest at a Macro-level
So back to Pokémon Conquest, we could say the main unit of gameplay is a battle (or maybe it’s a turn? And a battle is a system for generating interesting turns? Whatever). A battle consists of up to 6 warriors you control, each one of which with a single Pokémon, opposed by some number of enemy Pokémon, who may be controlled by enemy warriors, or might be ‘wild’ and can be caught. A battle is where all the tactics gameplay is happening, as you maneuver your troops and try to get their attacks to line up on the enemies while defending your own.
Up a level in the superstructure then, the campaigns you play can be thought of a system for producing interesting battles.
In the usual war game, a campaign is something like: you start with a single province or castle, you conquer the other ones, and eventually roll up the whole map (with some negative feedback in that as you conquer you have more to defend, but positive feedback in that the more territory you have you have greater resource generation). That’s how they work here too, and as with many wargames, the interface for this is a series of maps. You have to fight to conquer provinces, and each province has some locations where you can fight ‘random’ battles as well. Winning battles gets you provinces, or in the case of local random battles, nets you new warriors to recruit or Pokémon to catch.
When you first fire up Pokémon Conquest, you play through a main campaign that is part tutorial, and part… the entire game that most players will see. You progressively unlock the map, have scripted scenes with all the characters, and in the end, you face off against Nobunaga, and then meet and catch the god Pokémon who created the world. The End. It feels like an entire game. I think a great many players stop at the end of this first campaign, which is a shame, but understandable because it’s as long as you’d expect a game to be! As the fansite Serebii.net notes,
This game takes approximately 20 hours to complete the main narrative, but has a “Final Scenario” mode which adds many new missions to the game which can increase the time spent tenfold.
Whoa wait, what? But it’s true. Buried after the 20 hour tutorial opener is like the 200 hour main game. It’s wild.
“Episodes” as Repeatable Campaign Generators
A campaign is a system for generating interesting battles, but typically there’s not a higher level system for generating interesting campaigns. Like, you open Civilization, pick a civ to play as and set some parameters, and off you go. How you do in that game doesn’t impact the next game, nor will winning it unlock anything new. But not so in Conquest.
After you beat the main intro game, you gain the ability to play through various ‘episodes’. These take all the elements you’ve played with already, and have you re-play it all with novel setups or parameters. In most of these stories, you don’t even play as “you”, the player character, instead you play as one of the many other warlords in the game. In fact, in some episodes the player character is even an enemy AI-controlled warlord (which is a weird and cool feature I’d like to see used more as well).
Each of these episodes is like that platonic wargame campaign I mentioned before: You’re usually starting with a single castle, and you’re going to conquer the map. But each one changes who we play as and against. The victory conditions can vary as well, although they don’t vary a lot, usually ranging from “conquer this subset of regions”, to “conquer the whole game, again”. Some do put some minor twists on it though- a couple have the condition of needing to capture some number of Pokémon, or recruit some number of warlords. Some also change the nature of play slightly, the Ninja episodes restrict the Pokémon available to the Ninja-y types of Poison, Ghost, Dark and so on.
A common set-up for a series of episodes is a set where some group of warlords are fighting for some thematic reason. The first episode in the chain will have you play as the easiest or strongest of these, beating a bunch of other characters. Winning at that then unlocks the ability to play the whole story again, but from another perspective, and so on, usually ending with playing the most difficult set-up. It’s a simple and straightforward way to produce a lot of interesting campaigns, which because of the differences in set-up, are producing sets of interesting battles.
Playing through these episodes has almost a roguelike feel to it, since you’re really just replaying the same maps and battlefields over and over, but with slightly different set-ups each time, and all those shifting parameters make it interesting and new each time. Restarting over and over also means the game is continually rebalancing back to the start of the powercreep arc as well.
Persistence Through the Repetition
So far, what I’m describing is just a system for progressively unlocking campaigns via simple gating. Like, would Civilization be more fun if you couldn’t play as Venice until you got an economic victory as Rome? Not really (although, okay full disclosure, the answer for me is yes). But simply unlocking things one by one certainly loses its appeal over time, and restarting from scratch each game will render it tedious eventually too.
But something does persist campaign to campaign, and that’s the complement of Pokémon that each warrior has.
First, to explain: Any given warrior/warlord in the game starts with one or two, but they can catch any of the 200+ Pokémon in the game to keep as well. They also have type preferences, and can only get some Pokémon to high level, and (usually) only a single one all the way to 100%. The only way to know who their ‘perfect link’ might be is trial and error, so really you need a guide to spell it out. You want each warlord to have a good roster of type diverse Pokémon, and you want the generic warriors to have their perfect link. I quickly gave up trying to track it all myself, here’s what my notes looked like before giving up:
When you play the intro campaign, you’re doing this naturally, capturing Pokémon and making sure your best people have a good group to choose from. But as you play subsequent episodes, you learn that these teams persist. So if someone captures Pikachu or whoever in one story, they’ll have them for every subsequent campaign too. This can greatly modulate the difficulty, because a default warlord might only have a single unevolved Pokémon. But after a long campaign, they might have six fully evolved ones to choose from, and they’ll have them from the get-go in the next campaign you play.
This is so great! It means there’s this whole level of meta-progression you’re making in every campaign. Anybody you recruit, you have an incentive to develop them a little bit, even if you don’t need them this game, because it’ll make a future game a bit easier. This can change the difficult of the scenarios a lot, but it’s entirely player-driven. And it doesn’t make anything too easy, because the level of these Pokémon is reset each game. You’re always starting with low HP and damage, increasing over the arc of a given campaign. Just the selection a given warrior has is what you can increase each game, so you’re also slowing increasing the tactical complexity of the entire game over time.
And while you could theoretically grind out and fill everyone’s rosters in a single campaign, it’s a huge number of characters (over 200; and they’re almost all real historical personages, which is a hallmark of the Nobunaga’s Ambition series). And some of them are only available in a few stories. So instead it’s just something you’re slowly attending to over time.
So you’re not just unlocking new campaigns as you progress, you’re also changing how all the characters play for each future campaign. Neat!
(I’m explaining this all at a high level, if you can believe it, and focusing on the good bits. In the game as is, it’s all horribly under-documented. Keeping track of all these warriors and their teams is a huge pain, and there’s no way to find their perfect matches besides trial and error. This is a game that requires a wiki or guide to play. But I’m much more interested in poor execution of a neat idea than a perfectly polished but unoriginal one, aren’t you?).
Progression Systems Within Systems
This stories system is pretty cool, and I haven’t seen anything else quite like it. It’s solving a few problems at once-
- Multiperspectivity Storytelling: Campaign scenarios usually tell stories, but this allows for telling the same story multiple times from different characters’ points of view. You get to meet and remeet the same characters multiple times, allowing for character and story development that doesn’t need to all happen in the same concurrent story.
- Efficient Reuse: Each campaign is re-using the same map, battlefields, characters, everything. But rather than playing through it all once, the system allows for getting a lot of mileage without needing new bespoke assets. That’s game design, baby!
- Nested Progression: Everything you’re doing is moving the needle on a few different scales of progress. In a given battle you’re rewarded with progress (leveling, money) and over a campaign you’re making progress (territory, recruits), and making progress for future campaigns (expanding Pokémon teams, unlocking other episodes). That allows for multiple modes of investment and meaning into every session.
I feel like I’m not doing justice to everything that’s cool and interesting about this, but I’ve done my best! To me, it’s definitely an example I’ve mentally tucked away, and I suspect will influence some things I work on going forward.
Play It Yourself!
On one hand, I think there’s a lot of interesting design tucked away in this relatively obscure little game. But on the other hand, I’m trying not to hedge too much, but it definitely has some rough edges and user-unfriendly bits of design. But I think there’s external evidence that it is something special.
You can tell a lot about a game by the quality of its gameFAQs. Pokémon Conquest came out well past the site’s prime, but it still has some quality guides written for it. Check out Baconfry’s Warriors/Warlords Guide, which has the usual sort of expert commentary you’d expect on what rosters are the best for each warlord, the relative strength of each Pokémon, and so on. But it also includes all these cute little asides of historical trivia too. Like speculating that bug Pokémon user Yoshimoto is depicted as an unserious joke because the real Imagawa Yoshimoto was famously the loser of the Battle of Okehazama, where Oda Nobunaga beat him despite being outnumbered 8 to 1. Taking the time to point that out is the sort of life enriching detail you only get from something written as a labor of love like that.
There are better made games that don’t have nearly the depth of player scholarship on display that Conquest does. I don’t think that’s just because it’s a unique Pokémon game (though that helps), but because it has some ineffable quality to it that provokes a sort of studied enthusiasm.
You can also tell a lot about a game by its modding community. I’m not especially well versed in DS modding, but the size and passion of the community still making things for this game seems very impressive to me. There’s an entire dedicated program for patching ROMhacks for the game called RanseiLink. It’s more full-featured and user friendly than a lot of professional software, and it serves just this one purpose, modding a 12-year-old spinoff tactics game. What could be more beautiful?
And the mods themselves are pretty awesome too.
Let me recommend Pokémon Conquest Ultimate by Aaron’s Aron. It’s a jaw-dropping effort, huge in scope. It ‘s a complete rebalance of the game that radically changes the roster of the Pokémon available. In the base game there’s a dozen or so Pokémon you tend to start using a lot, Ultimate instead aims to have very little chaff, greatly deepening the tactical complexity of play. All the new Pokémon required hacking in new art too. It’s astounding to me that this exists! The Excel spreadsheet provided with the mod is so thorough and detailed, it’s a work of art itself.
So anyway anyway, I think that’s all I have to say about Pokémon Conquest! This ended up being a lot longer than I intended, but glad I was able to jot it all down while it was still fresh in mind.
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