For the people that love the work of Koei, Pokemon Conquest makes sense. A lot of the gameplay elements you've come to love from Nobunaga's Ambition are still in there, disguised very thinly by the fact that it involves Pokemon. This has been done on purpose, director Hisashi Koinuma told Joystiq, as a way to teach children about strategy games.
"As Tecmo Koei has created a lot of simulation titles, we wanted to introduce the genre of simulation games to children. It's not so much that we want them to start playing Nobunaga's Ambition as an entry point, but just as an entry point to the genre of simulation games.
"Especially in Japan," he continued, "the number of users of simulation games has really dropped over the years, so in order to keep people interested in that genre, we hope that kids would play this game and would take it as a suggestion of 'oh, simulation games are like this.' Then in the future they'd continue playing simulation games."
Koinuma went on to say that many potential fans of the genre are put off by the amount of difficult games on the market.