A thought that's been brewing

[malymin]

A monster-battler game with a small number of species that have high morphological variability.

That's a thought I've been having thinking about animal xenofiction and character adoption spaces.

The fantasy animal roleplay forums kallium talks about like Kats, which had both a "subtype" component and a "color" component in determining appearance and powers. Petz breeding, where you can wring so many unique animals out of just breeding the original breeds without modding just through color mutation and hybridzing features from different breeds. Closed species adoptable sites often have a list of features that can be added onto the default template or replace parts of the default template - different types of fins, wings, horns, special markings, etc. The Warriors fan-game Clangen contains tons of overlapping variables for appearance - mostly cosmetic, though a few (like lack of tail) confer disabilities. Genetics/breeding focused animal games often have only one species, maybe one or two more than that, but lots of variation within. Creatures, Wobbledogs, Niche.

People want their individual 'mons to feel unique, and this is what IVs and EVs in Pokemon are supposed to be for... but in practice it's just something to minimax for competitive players, that casual players barely notice. Early 3d Pokemon games had slight hue shifts on individual Pokemon to make them visually individual, but that was later abandoned.

I feel like taking a page from Persona's book, and having the starter be a "wild card" of sorts, able to absorb species and traits it encounters into a library that the player can swap out at rest spots. This lets you play with both mechanical and cosmetic elements at your own whims and deeply customize your starter, while not making your non-starter party slots redundant (since you can't switch the starter's build mid-battle).

Floated this idea by tresfoyle and she added:

Suggests some interesting directions re: the nature of your "starter" and what sort of plot you're in

My mind immediately leapt to something in the vein of "your buddy is a more benign equivalent to The Thing and you're doing some Svalbard seed vault shit with your whole local biosphere"

An angle that's intriguing... I feel like a lot of western indie "this will be pokemon for adults" mons games are sadly less interested in the biosphere of their monsters than Pokemon is.