Prompted by this post from Alone in the Labyrinth.
Pokemon is a setting that I feel I should have a take on. I was really into it as a kid, and in fact thinking up my own creatures/regions/etc was a first step towards most of my current hobbies.
In practice, I haven't been able to reinterpret it in a way that feels satisfying.
For one, I think any more narrative medium demands that you focus more on the interaction between pokemon and trainers, which is... sort of barren, as it currently exists. You catch a being in a ball and now it joyfully does whatever you say, modulo some minor problems that are always eventually overcome.
At this point I think it would be productive to engage in one of my favorite activities: Taking something apart in an attempt to understand it. So, digging into that feeling a bit... maybe the crux of the issue is that Pokemon justifies itself via doublethink. Pokemon are intelligent creatures, so they understand you and have cute, relatable personalities, but they're animals, so you make all the decisions. They're objects, so you're allowed to treat them like collectibles, but they're also sentient beings that you're meant to develop a bond with. They're wild, in the sense that they exist in "nature," but they're civilized, so they're never shown to eat anything but berries and meal cubes.
Ultimately, pokemon are convenient. They're compatible with video game mechanics, they work well as animated characters, they're kid-friendly and promote kid-friendly themes like adventurousness and friendship. They indulge particular fantasies, like having a magical animal companion, or engaging in pitched, superpowered battles, or acquiring new powers and becoming stronger by making use of them.
I think that convenience is ultimately the reason I find pokemon/trainer relationships uninteresting in their current form. As written, Pokemon rarely have motivations of their own, if those motivations would conflict with the priorities of their trainer. They rarely take much initiative, even to cooperate with trainers, because in that case their trainer would need to learn how to work with them rather than ordering them around. They can have personality traits, in contexts where that's easy to implement, but those traits are usually superficial. Interaction can occur, if the needs of the story call for it, but it can also be elided.
Taking a step back...
If I were to make my own setting in the monster collection genre, I think I would start by playing with some of the convenient ambiguities. The object/being binary is a particularly substantial one. Lots of interesting themes to explore there. To begin with, maybe there's a sense in which the monsters are literal objects - for example, the spirits of sacred weapons. So on one hand, they're embodied as items that someone can physically hold or keep locked up - and they lack the ability to do much of anything on their own.
On the other hand, there are questions you can raise about these beings' experience of the world and their motives. Do those weapons choose their wielders, or are they chosen? What do they think of the humans who fight with or over them? To what extent can they act independently? Do they have agendas of their own? And practically speaking, you can only wield one or two weapons at a time, so the characters of the ones you're using have much more direct significance.
Another route might be to swerve hard in the opposite direction and give monsters much more agency, so that it isn't really possible to "collect" them at all. Then maybe you end up with a game that's about negotiating with powerful forces, where it's possible to gain their cooperation, but any cachet you have with them is ultimately finite or temporary.
