The Pokémon series, for all that people write it off as a bunch of kids’ games, harbors a frankly impressive mechanical depth that just might help us crank out a generation of intelligent young Americans despite our education system’s shambling collapse. Even without getting into all those terrifying invisible traits — natures and IVs and EVs and what have you — the Pokémon games reward spur-of-the-moment tactical thinking, long-term planning, and asset management alike. The series’ complex web of relative strengths and weaknesses and vast pool of moves and powers gains an extra layer of trade-offs and balances when you factor in the fact that you can only travel with six of more than 600 monsters, each of which can only hold four skills at a time.
Pokémon Conquest, a Koei-developed strategy game co-starring a hand-picked selection of 200 of Game Freak’s marketable little critters, may well be every bit as mentally demanding as the core Pokémon games. It might not seem it at first, though; not only does it contain far fewer pokémon than the upcoming Black & White Version 2, each creature carries only a single battle command into combat. On top of that, each skill is set per species from the start; if (hypothetically speaking) it turns out one pikachu wades into the fray with nothing but the Thunderbolt command at hand, that’s the skill every single pikachu will know. And you can forget all about those invisible traits; Pokémon Conquest knows nothing of IVs and EVs or even natures.
