Living With the Pokémon Conquest (Nintendo DS)
Pokémon Conquest is a genuinely clever mashup of Pokémon and tactical strategy that holds up surprisingly well — if you can track down a copy, it's worth every penny for the right player.
If you've been searching for 'Pokémon Conquest' lately, you already know the situation: it's out of print, prices have climbed, and finding a clean copy takes some hunting. But the reason people are still searching for it over a decade after release tells you everything you need to know about how good this game actually is.
Pokémon Conquest launched in 2012 as a collaboration between Game Freak, The Pokémon Company, and Koei Tecmo — the studio behind the Nobunaga's Ambition series. The premise sounds like a corporate fever dream: Pokémon meets feudal Japanese strategy. But the execution is thoughtful and genuinely fun. It introduced a lot of younger players to the tactics genre without overwhelming them, and it gave longtime Pokémon fans a reason to think about their favorite creatures in a completely new way.
What makes it worth tracking down today is the post-game. The main story is a solid 10–15 hours, but once you finish it, the game opens up into a series of standalone episodes with different warlords, different win conditions, and different Pokémon rosters. It's the kind of content that justifies replaying the whole thing. For a DS title, that's a lot of game.
The current price point — hovering around $140 for a used cartridge — is the one thing that gives me pause recommending it broadly. That's a real investment for a handheld game from 2012. If you're a collector or a dedicated Pokémon fan, it's absolutely worth it. If you're casually curious, it might be worth waiting to see if prices shift or if a re-release ever materializes (fingers crossed).
Bottom line: Pokémon Conquest is a legitimately great game that deserves more attention than it got at launch. It's the kind of title that makes you wish Nintendo would just put it on the Switch eShop already. Until then, the used market is your best bet — and based on the demand, a lot of people clearly agree it's worth the search.