Of interest how are you planning on introducing new monsters to the player? Are they captured, recruited, bought, bred etc?

What? No love for Azure Dreams? While not strictly a monster raising game, it had mechanics which made it essential to upgrade your monsters. Every time you re-enter the dungeon, you start at level one, but your familiars keep their levels. Great game...

I actually never played that! I tried a ROM of it once but it did nothing but crash. From what I read it is kind of like the dungeon crawling in Tornoko's Dungeon and the "extra dungeon" at the end of Chocobo's Dungeon 2. But of course, with the added bonus of having a monster!

I will get my hands on a copy of this game and try it out, thank you.

I was in love with Monster Rancher and Dragon Warrior Monsters. I also liked Pikmin although its not precisely the same. And I do remember the Sonic pets. Thanks person for reminding me of those. So fun. I played a lot of Pokemon too.

Yes Monster Rancher and DWM are still one of my favorites. Never got too big into Pikmin but it is kind of the same concept. No problem, definitely not a big genre. <3

Of interest how are you planning on introducing new monsters to the player? Are they captured, recruited, bought, bred etc?

That is a big one. Have been trying to find what would work best for the game. Here is the most recent one, let me know what you think:

Player receives first monster of choice.

Does first dungeon (tutorial like), at the end of the dungeon the player will fight a "boss". After defeating the boss the player receives the essence of the boss along w/ an egg of that bosses family. Leaves dungeon, infuses the essence + egg to make the boss monster.

From there on it will be from a couple of ways:

Specific Monster Essence + Family Specific Egg = Desired Monster [Hatching a monster egg.]
Monster A + Monster B = New Monster C [Monster synthesis.]

These all work in reverse order as well... The player will have a "Monster Manual" with "pages" in it that they fill from doing numerous things in the game. Such as clearing dungeons, quest and winning tournaments. The player chooses a page from the book and decides if they want to hatch a monster or synthesize. Some monsters will be synthesis only and others will be hatching (regular encounters in dungeons for example.). The page will tell you exactly what you need to Hatch/Synthesize the monster.

An example of Synthesis:
You want to make this [color=#B22222]Boss you just beat. You can't hatch it.
You see it requires you use [color=#0000CD]one specific monster and for the second monster it only needs to be a[color=#FF8C00] [color=#006400]monster from the same family as the boss.
So. . .

[color=#0000CD]Specific Monster + [color=#008000]Any Monster From Family = [color=#B22222]Boss.

Hmm. I feel like I went on for too long, there is a lot more to all of this. I apologize for the lengthiness, just trying to answer a very simple question with a dragged out explanation.

Here

TL;DR - HATCH OR COMBINE

Sounds workable.

I like monster breeding games, which have maybe a 50% overlap with monster raising games. For example Fish Tycoon and Plant Tycoon are games which have the breeding but not the raising, and playing a hunter in WoW or a venomancer in Perfect World has the raising but not the breeding. Then there's a third possibility, games like Dofus where you breed and 'raise' mounts but the mounts don't actually fight, they're like equipment that you wear when you fight and they get a share of your xp while you have them equipped. I particularly dislike Pokemon's game mechanics (both combat and breeding) that's the only reason I'm not a big fan of that series, since the Pokemon themselves are pretty cool, especially ones like Eevee with the various possible evolutions. I hate the 1 monster, 4 moves combat system. I find the one-pet system in WoW-like games acceptable but boring, especially when the pets don't have unique spells/skills of their own or slots into which the player can plug a unique set of skills to customize the pet's fighting ability. I much prefer either a turn-based tactical system like Disgaea (no breeding, but you can buy dragons, manticores, etc to use as units as an alternative to the default humanoid ones) or a CCG system where each monster is treated as a card in a deck during combat, but when not in combat you can breed them and otherwise interact with them.

If you want to know about Azure Dreams, it is actually a roguelike. There's a dungeon of many floors (it happens to go up in a tower instead of down, but the concept is the same. You always enter at the ground floor, and your character is level 1; the monsters retain xp from the tower and equipment retains bonuses but the player does not, for some reason. Each time you proceed to the next floor it is impossible to go back, and the monsters get harder about equally fast as you level up, except your pets run out of energy unless you find rare items to feed them and your equipment stays low level unless you find rare items to buff it. You can't capture monsters, eggs are one of the rare treasures you can find laying around. Fighting pretty much consists of whomping things with your sword, and when you do your pet autoattacks too. The exception that makes it a bit interesting is you find spell orbs, then you can cast that spell for the number of charges the sphere holds (you can't see how many without using up another uncommon item to check). But overall you only need at raise about 3 monsters to complete the game, the rest you hatch then never play with, which I think is a flaw with this kind of game.