Episode 177: Pokemon Conquest

[Troy Goodfellow]

With everyone very busy and very tired, a shorter and smaller show than usual this week. Troy welcomes Pokemon trainer and DS guru Nadia Oxford to the show to talk about the weird mixture of Pokemon and Nobunaga's Ambition in Pokemon Conquest. How does it differ from other Pokemon games? Do the strategic and tactical levels work? As the 3DS slowly pushes the original out of the way, what is legacy of the DS as a strategy platform?

Nadia's Pokemon Conquest review

Listen here:

[s8g]

Thanks for a podcast with that topic! I'm actually waiting for my copy of the game to arrive from the UK. I hope it will be longer fun than Pokemon Black which I started playing a month ago and I'm nowhere near finished. But the 20 hours I spent with the game were a goodf time. Also full of childhood memories.

I haven't played any title of the Nobunaga's Ambition Series. Is there any game (available to the western audience) that one should've played?

[Codicier]

This podcast feels a bit like a missed opportunity, it's not that Troy or Nadia put in a bad performance more that a lot of questions were left unanswered and many viewpoints left unexplored.

I would have loved to have heard from Matthew Burns about if the theme and mechanics were a good match, or have Julian, Todd, or Jenn chip in.

I think the reason they don't call the setting Japan instead of Ransei is simply to further distance it from being accused in any way of slandering/or making light of a national icon, just look at the games Japanese title "Pokémon Nobunaga's Ambition" and take a moment to play some mad libs on that theme (I'm sure someone's done this already but nevertheless it made me chuckle for a moment).

<Children's entertainment franchise> <Famous Patriotic Leader> <Emotion>

The Wombles Churchill's Intent:

Making good use of the things that they find, Churchill's Womble army drive back the nazi threat with tanks made of recycled food can's.

I've got a lot more thought's and (more importantly) questions about Pokemon, historic fiction, and DS Strategy games and i'll try and do a proper post on some of that when I get back in the evening.

[hexgrid]

There was some discussion about the location being "Ransai". It's worth noting that Kansai is the region of Japan containing Kyoto, which was the imperial capitol for most of recorded Japanese history. I presume they chose a modified name partly to be cute, and partly as shorthand for "we're making no attempt at historical or geographic accuracy here".

[Gormongous]

I've also been intrigued by the Japanese penchant for essentializing their national figures lately. I stumbled upon the Sengoku Basara anime while playing Shogun 2 and was totally baffled by the gleeful and crass transformation of complex historical personages into fighting game archetypes. It has a way of making the sengoku jidai seem more elemental, a clash between ideologies and a crossroads for the future, which suits its status as a foundational myth just fine.

I can't recommend Sengoku Basara, though. It's utter dross. I can't even recommend the book I'm reading to cleanse my palette, Taiko by Yoshikawa Eiji. For being a fictionalized biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and a supposed literary treasure, there's just way too much inconsistent characterization and informed attributes going on.

No, Troy. You should watch all the anime where they gender-swap Nobunaga and company: Sengoku Otome and Oda Nobuna no Yabou for versions set historically, or Sengoku Collection where they all go to modern-day high school together!

[Codicier]

@ Gormongous If we are going to try and melt Troys's brain by exposing him to dubious anime re-imaginings of historical charcaters lets go flat out.

@Troy click if you

.The click a second time to fully understand the horror. Everyone else don't worry its perfectly safe (if silly) for people without a history degree to view, Troy on the other hand may never fully recover.

[Afterward]

I guess I'm pretty late to this party, but I hope nobody will mind if I ramble about Pokemon for a while...

I was disappointed too that the game didn't match up with Japanese history/geography as much as it could have, but I think the choice basically makes sense. For one thing, the worlds of the main series already take place in a goofy version of Japan. Sinnoh (where Diamond and Pearl take place) is in the shape of the Hokkaido prefecture; Red/Blue/Gold/Silver take place in and around the Tokyo area; various in-game locations map to real-world landmarks in extremely goofy ways. The tradition with spin-off games has been to take them out of the map of the main series, for whatever reason.

Pokemon Conquest also saddled itself with associating each town with one of the 17 Pokemon types, which are traditionally "gated" in a convoluted way to maintain an established curve of type-interaction complexity. You always always start out with the Fire/Grass/Water triangle (this has gotten pretty boring over the years, but they keep doing it), and more powerful and fancy types like Ghost, Ice, Steel, and Dragon have to be kept from you until the endgame.

This is on top of matching the historical figures to Pokemon types that fit their fictionalized personalities, and of course you have to keep Nobunaga way at the other end of the map from the starting point, and so on. Doing this all on a map that looks like Japan (much less putting each warlord somewhere near their real-life location) would be basically impossible. It would have been really cool if they were able to let go of some of their other priorities to indulge the historical aspect a little more, but Pokemon tradition won out.

There's another "good" reason that the map isn't Japan, but it's a spoiler! Beware! Beware of spoilers!

When the last set of kingdoms is opened up and the entire map is revealed, true Pokemon nerds will notice that the whole Ransei region is an island in the shape of Arceus, the God Pokemon, which Nobunaga has been trying to summon by uniting the kingdoms under his iron fist! All along! Yes, this is extremely stupid!

By the way, according to the experts at Bulbapedia, in Japanese the name "ransei" means "turbulent times"—which I guess makes sense.