So I've been playing an absolute shitload of monster collecting games lately. Pokemon and Pokemon fangames, Digimon, Monster Hunter Stories, Shin Megami Tensei... There's a billion other examples, I'm sure.

It's got me wondering, what would your ideal monster collecting game look like? I think there's three big parts to the genre:

(1) Collection. Collecting monsters, in other words. How do you get new monsters, when do you get new monsters? How many are there, how many can you get?

(2) Growth. Once you've collected a monster, how do you let it grow stronger? Does it evolve like in Pokemon or Digimon, can you fuse monsters like SMT? What other way of customizing the monster is there? Is there some point at which the monster stops growing, and how soon does it come?

(3) Battle. How do battles work? Do your monsters fight for you, do you fight alongside your monsters? What difficulty curve are you aiming for? What about multiplayer?

 

Exploration needs to be the biggest focus. A game like this needs an open-world that is considered by all as 'too big.' I want as much space as possible for each of the monsters to roam and exist in their natural habitats, and I just don't feel immersed by taking two steps out of a town into a tiny forest where these monsters spawn in this one patch of grass.

Different, diverse and believable biomes are most important to me. Forests you can explore for hours, caves you can get lost in, mountain ranges that are the size of actual mountains. I want the monsters to exist in the world, and I don't think you can do that believably without proper, gargantuan scale.

Not to my satisfaction, anyway.

With a world that size, the question of how to get around it is of paramount importance. A lot of open world games fuck this up, and it just feels tedious and terrible to move in it. BOTW pioneered the glider, but I think even that feels old now. The only open world games whose traversal felt so good that, even with fast travel, I never used it were Spiderman PS4 and Black Desert Online.

The former for obvious reasons, though a grappling hook that doesn't need grappling points wouldn't go amiss. We've mastered how we get down from high points, we need a better way of getting up now. The latter just has a glorious mount mechanic system where you're almost drifting with a horse that feels so satisfying that I just ran everywhere. That can easily be adopted and expanded upon in a game where you catch monsters.


As for combat, my personal completely unpopular dream is for my involvement to end when combat starts.

Weird, right?

Basically a modern day version of Digimon World. I want my job to be raising, feeding, training, teaching, preparing and strengthening these monsters, then the fruits of my labour will show with the decisions the monster makes in conmbat - with maybe limited input with some shouted suggestions like in Digimon World.

In that way I almost want it to be a Football Manager game, lol...