Pokemon does have that cool twist where you can upgrade your monsters through their transformation, and make them gain new abilities and change their appearance. Like I remember with Pikachu, you can use this stone to transform him right away into his final form, Rychu, but if you don’t let him transform naturally, he’ll loose his agility boost that he otherwise gets. (then Rychu isn’t very fast)
But there are a lot of monster collection/breeding/maintenance games out there. My favorite is the Shin Megami series where you enlist the aid of various demons, have them merged together to form stronger ones and stuff. It’s a lot darker and more mature than Pokemon, which fits my tastes a little more.
Still, it’s a genre of game, or at the very least a sub genre of RPG anyway. What would be cool is seeing a larger amount of titles to pick from. Whether they’re original or not wouldn’t matter much to me, as long as they’re done right. And don’t include stupid gimicky crap like Monster Rancher did by finding monsters in every compact disc you can get your hands on. Lol.
But have I ever thought of making a game like that? If I ever worked on a game like this, seeing as I don’t play them that often, I’d be much more interesting in creating monster design, than the whole game. I’d leave that to someone else. but my monsters would all be overly violent and gross looking, nothing you’d want to cuddle anyway XD