This week has been really great!  I’ve got two brand new Pokémon games to play, and they are both equally awesome!  I just started playing Pokémon Conquest, as well as a Japanese copy of Pokémon White 2.  (No, I don’t speak Japanese.  But I do speak the common language of Pokémon!)

I would love to tell you all about how awesome Pokémon White 2 is, but certain people don’t want to read any spoilers before the game comes out in America.  So I’m happily deflecting to my good friend and awesome blogger Jenn, who has been doing some really great coverage of the newest Pokémon installment.  I highly recommend that you check out her blog – she’s been detailing which Pokémon appear in which areas, best strategies to beating the Gym leaders, and she’s got lots of great photos to show you the way!  Read Jenn’s blog today!

And now for a little world conquest!

Pokémon Conquest is more than just a tactical game.  (Personally I love tactical games tho!)  Yes, you have a grid board that you move your army around and you have to take turns making moves and setting up traps for your opponent.  But in this game, your army is made up of Pokémon!  You start out with an Eevee (who can be evolved later in game!) and your friend has a Jigglypuff.  As you progress in the game, you take on new regions that are filled with new wild Pokémon that you can befriend and add to your team.  Not only that, but you can expand your army by recruiting warriors who have already trained strong Pokémon to help you with your quest.

What I love about this game is that it brings together so many games that I already like.  The board-game style battling is reminiscent of old games like Stratego and Risk, only made ten times better by using Pokémon instead.  Some of the battle areas are type-specific, so if your Pokémon can’t fly, don’t stand on a part of the grid that’s got a poison puddle on it!  And so on.

Not only do you have to manage your army on the battlefield, you also have to manage your kingdoms.  This is where another one of my favorite old games comes in – Civilization.  Maybe a bit of Sim City too.  Those games are all about managing your resources and delegating tasks to your minions.  So if you don’t want to spend all day battling your Pokémon in every kingdom, you can set each kingdom to work on Training, Scouting or finding Gold on their own.

Let’s not forget that this game is all about POKEMON!  So in addition to everything else, you’ve gotta catch em all!  You can acquire wild Pokémon, use your warriors’ Pokémon, and you can evolve Pokémon too!  Through the game you can obtain different held items, some of which can be used to evolve your Pokémon, just like in the regular game!  Plus there are a ton of passwords for really cool Pokémon that you can get from Serebii.

OK I can’t help but say one negative thing about Pokémon Conquest.  You can’t transfer any of your hard earned Pokémon from Conquest to any other game.  There’s no way of trading or transferring anything to Black and White.  Wah.  Luckily I have plenty of Pokémon on those games so I don’t need Conquest for that anyway!

It’s been very tough balancing playing both Conquest and White 2!  They are both so awesome!  I’ve been posting my updates on White 2 on Twitter, so if you wanna talk about Black & White 2, keep it in Twitter so JDubz doesn’t complain about me posting spoilers on this blog lol!

Have you picked up either of these two games?  What are you playing lately?