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Pokemon!

Digimon!

Monster Rancher!

Medabots!

Shin Megami Tensei! (or Persona, hell I don't know)

This space will probably get filled by something else

[Classic]

It's... It's a kind of fucked up thing man.
Persona 3 Movie 6 - Persona [English]

[Disposable Ninja]

School Children shoot themselves in the head to summon the ancient spirits floating around inside their brains in order to battle demons from hell.

[jsnlxndrlv]

As much as I love Persona and SMT, I can't really put it in the pocket monster genre, even though you really are collecting mythological entities. As games they're arguably superior, but I can't help but feel they're only in on a technicality; they're just regular RPGs employing back-up characters that take monstrous forms. By that standard, if somebody were to hack a version of Final Fantasy Tactics so that all the characters were furries, we'd have to include that in this poll, too, and it blatantly wouldn't belong.

[François]

By that standard, Pokémon itself barely fits into the pocket monster game; whatever it is that makes it into something else than a straight-up RPG, is also found in SMT, except maybe the multiplayer aspect which is not altogether essential to the core mechanics. SMT may have more to it than the recruiting, training, breeding and collecting of relatively expendable former foes met in random encounters, but at the basic gameplay level, very similar things are going on. Demon races are not classes.

[Beat Bandit]

School Children shoot themselves in the head to summon the ancient spirits floating around inside their brains in order to battle demons from hell.

And yet it's still not as fucked up as Persona 2.

SMT may have more to it than the recruiting, training, breeding and collecting of relatively expendable former foes met in random encounters, but at the basic gameplay level, very similar things are going on. Demon races are not classes.

Final Fantasy 8 should be on this list too.

[François]

Well, it arguably has a collectible monster minigame, so that makes it a collectible monster game. Just like Xenosaga is a CCG, and Blades of Steel is a shmup.

Alright, alright, alright. Instruct me. Illuminate me. What are the specific elements in, say, Pokémon, that a) make it into a collectible monster franchise, and b) are absent from SMT? I'm honestly intrigued!

[Beat Bandit]

Having the main character participate in fights.

[François]

I concede that SMT is not a cock-fighting simulator in that you don't usually sit back while your allies get horribly maimed in your stead, but mechanically it's still about filling out your pokédex demon compendium by throwing pokéballs at negociating with random encounters and breeding good skills onto strong creatures until you have a team strong enough to take out the final four God and his stooges.

[Beat Bandit]

Yes, you do those thing. Every game in the world has that though. Be it armor, spells, monsters, maps, whatever. I feel what really sets the line though is that you play SMT games for the JRPG aspects and the way the "collecting" plays out is always a little different.

Meanwhile every pokemon game you get you'll know exactly what the capturing / battling system will be like and other things change.

[François]

I keep trying to wrap my head around the fact that you're telling me that you don't think a series of games where collecting monsters is a main element of progress qualifies as a collectible-monster game. I know we're debating the most useless of semantics here, but trying to understand your position is an interesting mental exercise.

Yes, you do those thing. Every game in the world has that though. Be it armor, spells, monsters, maps, whatever.

Okay, yeah, in these sorts of incredibly general terms you do accumulate and enhance modular assets to improve your in-game effectiveness. Just like in Pokémon.

I feel what really sets the line though is that you play SMT games for the JRPG aspects and the way the "collecting" plays out is always a little different.

SMT is a JRPG series with intricate and extremely solid monster-collecting mechanics that form the core of its gameplay and vary slightly between installments. I just don't see why any definition should be so narrow as to exclude it. I mean, what if I say Nocturne is a monster-collecting JRPG? Does that work better? It can be both. I honestly couldn't imagine telling someone about that game in any detail without mentioning all the monster-collecting it has going on.

[Disposable Ninja]

Having the main character participate in fights.

Levant, the player character in Jade Cocoon (which is, inarguably, a monster collecting game), is usable in battle. Though, you really don't want to use him since his stats don't grow, and he starts getting slaughtered early in the game. Of course, you have to, though, since you have to switch to him in order to capture wild monsters.