Saving the JRPG - Pokemon Conquest

Pokemon Conquest will save the Japanese RPG.

No, wait - allow me to explain myself! I'm not saying it's the best RPG of all time, nor is it an absolute must-play for everyone. It's just what the title represents and how it's executed that matters.

Before I discuss why Pokemon Conquest will save the JRPG, I must discuss the mainline Pokemon series and an earlier spinoff.

For many people, Pokemon Red or Blue was their first JRPG. It certainly is a gentle introduction to the genre - you can never lose progress in Pokemon, just money, like in the Dragon Quest series. The series teaches players to level up their parties to make them stronger, and teaches them about status ailments and all the other regular JRPG stuff. It also appeals - and is directly marketed - to kids.

Hook 'em young, right?

The thing is, once a kid gets hooked on Pokemon, he tends to broaden his horizons with regards to JRPGs. He may check out Dragon Quest, which is probably where Nintendo would like him to go next since they publish that series here in the States. Or they may check out Final Fantasy, since that's a premier series as well. Regardless, they got to those series as a direct result of being taught JRPG fundamentals from Pokemon.

But what of niche RPGs? How could a company - any company, not just Nintendo - expand the audiences for those? Pokemon doesn't teach kids how to play strategy RPGs, for example. Nor does the mainline series teach kids how to play roguelikes.

Until Pokemon Mystery Dungeon, that is.

The Mystery Dungeon series didn't start with the Pokemon version - it actually started with Dragon Quest. With its roots in the PC game Rogue, the Mystery Dungeon series starts a character - sometimes a few more - in the entrance to a randomly generated dungeon filled with enemies. They are then tasked to explore the dungeon and make it out alive, a tall task due to the random nature of the game. In most roguelikes, if the player dies, they lose everything, including their levels.

Not so, though, in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon. The player character in Pokemon Mystery Dungeon levels up and actually maintains those levels even if they die - they might lose some items, but the game doesn't really punish the player too hard. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon also lets players recruit other Pokemon to help them fight, which makes the dungeons that much easier.

This is a pretty clever way to introduce roguelikes to a completely unsuspecting audience, wouldn't you think?

And that's exactly what happened, at least with me. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon on DS made me a fan of roguelikes. I have since gone on to play Shiren the Wanderer, on both DS and Wii (they are completely separate games despite sharing a title), Final Fantasy Chocobo's Dungeon, and a few others such as Fatal Labyrinth and Dragon Crystal (Shiren on DS is the best roguelike of all time, in my opinion). I never would have played any of those games without having eased my way into the genre with Pokemon Mystery Dungeon.

So where does Pokemon Conquest fit into all this? Well, it follows that a company such as Koei would try to pitch Nintendo* on letting them use the Pokemon characters in one of their incredibly obscure Nobunaga's Ambition series. They saw people pick up obscure types of games like roguelikes and must have thought, "Why not try to make a Pokemon Nobunaga's Ambition game? Surely we can try to get people into this type of game to sell our own brand eventually." And that's pretty much what they've done here. Pokemon Conquest is Nobunaga's Ambition with Pokemon in it. It is, I'm sure, not anywhere near as hard (or probably as complicated) as the series that inspired it, but I will tell you - once I'm done with Pokemon Conquest, I'm going to look into Nobunaga's Ambition. Mission accomplished, Koei.

Pokemon is such a weird IP, isn't it?

So how, exactly, will Pokemon Conquest save the JRPG? Well, it by itself will not. But it is a stepping stone to expanding the audience of these games. Pokemon is such a huge juggernaut that every title with the word "Pokemon" on it will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, if not millions. If a game like Pokemon Conquest does well, who's to say the Pokemon series won't eventually expand to other types of RPGs and make the fanbase of the genre grow even more? The fact that Pokemon Conquest is so good gives me hope that this is exactly what will happen. 


*it had to have been Koei pitching Nintendo. There's no way it would be the other way around, right?